I was riffling through a stack of books this morning that have been sitting next to my bed waiting to be read since... oh, sometime last fall... and found a copy of a selection from an Advent book that a friend shared with me back in December. Meaning to reread it, I had printed it out and stuck it in with said books; now, it makes a timely appearance.
Intended for the Advent season, yes, but it resonates with me now, this day. This day, I see broken and messed up and wrong. I see it, and I focus on it. And each time, each bit of news or negative word enables that focus. And it's true – our world is very broken. But sometimes I forget to look for the good, to look for the light. So I find these thoughts quite appropriate, and I want to learn to watch for the light, to dwell on the ways in which God is coming quietly and redeeming, the ways in which He is making right, the ways in which at just the right time, He will fulfill everything that is scattered and longing – the ways in which He has already done just that.
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This is adapted from an Eberhard Arnold selection in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, bolded words my own.
"When the time was fulfilled..."
You came to us at Bethlehem when the time was fulfilled.
What insight there is in these words!
We are concerned day in and day out
with lesser or greater matters in the service of your kingdom.
We work sometimes until we are weary
and yet we see so little result.
Does everything remain as it was?Haven't we gone forward at all?
And then we see again the light
shining from the stable in Bethlehem.
Christ came not after a great mass of people had accomplished something good,
but as a miracle, as a gift from you
which you lay into those arms that are stretched out to you in longing.
So we wait sometimes for years to be freed from some need.
For a long, long time we look out from the darkness
in search of the light.
And then when the time was fulfilled,
a solution,
a light,
a deliverance comes quite unexpectedly
though perhaps quite differently than we expected.
So it is with our yearning for the salvation of the world,
for a new shining forth of the kingdom of God.
When we are discouraged,
this we can still know:
the time shall be fulfilled.
In all the noise and activity and work,
we often do not hear the hidden gentle sound
and the movement of the life that is coming into being.
But here and there,
you let us see how everywhere you are at work
and how your cause is growing and moving forward.
The time is being fulfilled.
The light shall shine,
perhaps just when it seems to us that the darkness is impenetrable.
But the miracle comes not only from above,
but also through us,
waiting for the hour when we open our souls up
and let them flow out into the world.
Wherever love proceeds from us and becomes truth,
the time is fulfilled.
Then your divine power floods through our relationships and all our works.
Then everything that is lonely and scattered
and longing for you
shall be bound together in you,
and then shall the world be born
in which Christmas is fulfilled as reality.
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