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A Message From Our Pastor

December, 2011

Dear Friends,

Greg Glover, Pastor of Southminster Presbyterian Church, recently led an Advent workshop for pastors in our presbytery. The title of the workshop was “Advent Wait Training.” Greg suggested that even though “waiting conjures painful images of useless wastes of time: waiting in line, anxiously awaiting news in a hospital waiting room, waiting in traffic for a light to change,” waiting may actually be good for us. He asks, “what if waiting is as crucial to our spiritual health as resistance training is to an astronaut who spends extended time in a weightless environment?

We may wish to escape the gravity that is constantly tugging at us, but are we better off in an instantaneous world? “ In order for all of us to consider how we may be called to waiting as a kind of   spiritual discipline or a special kind of training during the season of Advent, Greg has created a website that provides a “Spiritual Resistance Training Program” for Advent. While the study is for small groups, I think it could also be useful as a personal devotion guide. The website is: www.adventwait.com. The first week’s lesson begins with this idea: “Our deepest longings and desires are a God-shaped void that can only be filled by our Creator.

Our culture would lead us to believe that we can find fulfillment elsewhere, and without delay, but such fulfillment is artificial. Advent waiting with other people of faith helps us to resist all substitutes that are not God and therefore cannot fulfill us.”

Even if you don’t have an opportunity to study the lessons at adventwait.com, I encourage you to consider in what ways all the busy-ness in our lives prevents us from slowing down long enough to allow God to fill us. Consider how all of us want to fix any problem quickly, often taking matters into our own hands rather than waiting for God’s guidance. Consider how, when we do actually wait for God, we are often pleasantly surprised by the form God’s answer takes! Advent is a season of waiting and preparation, but we often miss it because preparing for the Christmas holiday is about “doing” a long list of things instead of waiting to see what God has done and will do. So this Advent season, make it a priority to slow down and wait. Wait for something. Wait for someone. And begin to open your heart and your life to the practice of waiting for the God who reveals himself through the surprising gift of his son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

In Christ,

Pastor Kim

 

"We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus for the good works
which God has already designated to make up our way of life.

                                                                                            Ephesians 2:10

       

 
 
 

Rev. Kim Olson

 
 

calligraphy by

Timothy R. Botts

from the book of Psalms, Tyndale House Publishers

 

 

 
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