First Day of Advent

"Coming! I'm coming!" That's the cry of our Lord himself during this Advent season.
Our job is to wait. And to create an open quiet space, so that when He shows up, we'll notice.

We wait in tension - the tension between the "already" of Jesus' first coming as an infant in a manger, and the "not yet" of Jesus' second coming in glorious triumph to put all things to rights and to re-establish His reign of peace and mercy and justice.

Someone reminded me yesterday that the good thing about tension - living in between the "already" and the "not yet" is that we are nudged into balance. We're called not to live in the past or in the future, but in the now. And we maintain our balanced "now" with steady doses of contemplation (time in silence with God) and action (time in activity for and with others).

May this Advent be a time when the tension in our lives draws us into alertness not alarm, balance not exhaustion. In this season, there is enough time for all the important things. May we have the grace to let go of the rest.

Faithfully,
Janet+

The blog is back!

Dear Friends in Christ -
Our former blog has been down for nearly a month. UGH! And multiple attempts at recovering it have proven futile. That's the bad news.

The good news is that lots of people have noticed that the blog is down - and want it back. We've started to rely on the blog as a way to connect and communicate. I've certainly missed being able to reach out to you this way.

So this is the first post on our new blog: www.25church.blogspot.com. Tell your friends. Invite your neighbors.

God is doing great things at St. Paul's, and we don't want them to miss out!!!

Faithfully blogging again
Rev. Janet+