How Does a Weary World Rejoice?

Our theme for this Advent-Christmas season is learning to practice joy in a weary world. We try so hard to set aside the weariness, struggle, and difficulty of life in favor of joy. And yet most of the time what we do is little more than pretending that the pain isn’t there. The truth is that in God’s kingdom joy comes as we honestly and authentically journey through our pain. That is, after all, part of what the cross teaches us. Christ had to journey through the pain of death in order to experience the joy of resurrection. Mary had to journey through the pain of childbirth in order to experience the joy of a son, God’s son! The shepherd’s had to experience the fear from what they saw appear to them in the form of angel’s before they could experience the good news of the angel’s message. And so on and so forth. It is the way of the world God gave us, a world that is not without pain and strife. Yet a world that always births joy from pain and strife! And that is good news!

As we begin this Advent journey, below is a poem that speaks to the theme from the wonderful folks at Sanctified Art. You will need a password to view the entire poem (and this will be the case for each of the Advent posts this season as we strive to follow copyright laws and the permissions of our Advent series). The password can be found in your weekly emails from the church (sign up for emails here) or you can email us using the contact form at the bottom of this page.

The Last Time I Saw God

Poem by Rev. Sarah (Are) Speed

The last time I saw God
face to face
I was looking at a bed of tulips.
God was every color of red.
I was merely a mortal,
in awe of it all.

The time before that,
we were tying back
the curtains,
looking for stars.
God was the deepest purple
and the brightest light.