Advent Devotional: Friday, December 20, 2024

For I know the plans I have for you says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm. To give you a future with hope. Then when you call on me and come and pray to me, I will hear you.  Jeremiah 29:11-12

Illustrated by Elizabeth Martin (Age 8)

What gives you hope? What do you hope for? Those are great questions for each of us as we enter the season of Advent and a time of expectancy and self-reflection.

Like everyone, I can recall times in my life when circumstances and events left my hopes, expectations, and even my faith in God feel far away. Thirty-nine years ago this month we sold 160 acres of farm land which had been in my family for over 100 years. It came following three generations and years of investing equity, labor, blood, sweat and tears into grain and livestock production and a way of life. It came as the cumulative result of financial decisions I had made, governmental monetary and trade policy changes, and several years of brutal regional Midwest weather, years which older neighborhood farmers insisted were worse than those they experienced in the 1930s. The old joke says, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” There are lessons in that old joke. The plans were mine, more self-centered and self-serving than God-centered. My plans were not God’s.

In December of 1985 when I looked out a window or walked out a door, I was physically and emotionally surrounded by the knowledge of what I had lost. Had it not been for Donna’s love and support, our children, family, friends, and church family I truly believe I would not be here today. I had failed those who I was responsible for. I was humiliated, I was humbled, I was on my knees. God met me there. God had been there along, blessing me every day but I had been too busy depending on me, not on Him.

In this season of Advent my hope is in God, His word to us, and in His church. Christ who loves and cares for us every day and will not let us go. God’s word which teaches us how He wants us to live in this time and place. Christ’s church, the one place where the gospel is proclaimed, where we learn the habits of love and intentionally practice what God’s word teaches us.

In this Advent season, perhaps more than at any time in my life, I believe I understand how desperately the world needs us, Christ’s church. The world needs us, the body of Christ, to practice the habit of love and to reflect the hope God promises to all of us. Paraphrasing the words of Henri Nouwen, “the church, even with its long painful history of us, people who repeatedly are tempted to choose power over love, to place control over the cross, to lead rather than being led. Those who resist this temptation to the end give us hope and are the true saints.”

Gracious and loving God, forgive us for failure to live in the hope you promise us through the birth, life, teaching, and resurrection of your son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for your word to us and for your church in this world. We pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance that we may worthy of the name, Christians, who humbly reflect your love and hope in our families, our homes, our work, our neighborhoods and in our world to everyone we meet.

Bill Ramsey

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