Thought for the Week - 5/12/2021

Dear Friends, 

During Advent this year I’m using Gordon Giles’ book At Home in Advent – a Domestic Journey from Advent to Epiphany. For this first week we have been ‘Travelling through Advent’ thinking about things like motorways, buses, boats, trains and cars, and also traffic lights, and this quote made me smile. ‘There is an Italian joke that say that in Milan, traffic lights are instructions, in Rome, they are suggestions and in Naples, they are Christmas decorations.’ You may already have put up your Christmas tree with its decorations, or you may be putting it off for as long as you can, but the colours we see – the reds, golds (or ambers), greens and others – can be a reminder of the life of Jesus. Red reminds us of his blood spilled on the cross and his sacrifice for the sin of the world; perhaps the amber reminds us that Jesus is the light of the world, who is our guide, shining in the darkness; and the green can remind us of new life, thinking ahead to Springtime and the awakening in the garden and new birth (and of course the hope of warmer weather too!). But as Advent begins and progresses, the temptation is always to rush ahead to the celebration of Christmas forgetting the importance of lingering. Now that is a great word, ‘lingering’. It means ‘to stay in a place longer than necessary because of a reluctance to leave’. I think that Jesus may have liked to linger because we often read of him in the gospel accounts spending time in quietness in the presence of the Father. Of course for Jesus, that precious time in his Father’s presence was essential for him to know the will of the Father, and we also need to cultivate such times in God’s presence too. The apostle Paul writing to the believers in Rome says, ‘Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is true worship. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will’ (Romans 12:1-2). Only when we take that time – to stop as the red traffic light tells us – can we then look at our lives and focus on those things that we know need addressing – then we can go, living out lives modelled on Jesus’ life of sacrifice and love. I discovered this week that the green light of a traffic light has never meant ‘go’ but to ‘proceed if the way is clear’. Our hope is that our way will be clear, but if it is not, then we should make certain that we are living as closely to the Lord and his ways as we can. 

Grace and peace

Neil

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