Friday, December 02, 2011

Prepare for the person, not the event

Listen to the Sunday podcast about the 2nd Sunday in Advent:


My favorite thoughts:
  • We should be eager to be without blemish, we should be prepared for that coming. That's what Advent is preparing us to do, to prepare our own hearts, to prepare our own minds for what's going to take place when Jesus comes, not just as a baby, not just when Jesus comes again at the end of time, but when Jesus comes into your life this week.
  • They were trying to prepare for an event, John the Baptist was trying to prepare them for a person. How many of us have gotten trapped in this already, during this Advent season, where we've been preparing for the event? Maybe you've been online shopping, maybe you've been looking around, maybe you've been setting up and decorating the house, and certainly none of these things are terrible because they're all part of how we enter into Christ's birthday.
  • But if we are more concerned with the event than the person...if we're preparing our houses and our lives for the event when family comes over and we exchange gifts and we do this and that, rather than the person, who's crashing into our presence at that Christmas mass, who's crashing into our presence every single day through the sacraments, through the Word and one another... if we're preparing for the event and not the person we've missed the boat.
  • You and I should have an urgent desire for Christ to be within us, among us and King of us once again. We should have an urgency to encounter Jesus everyday in prayer, in reading the readings, in going to the Eucharist. We should have this urgent desire in our hearts for Christ to come back TODAY, for us to be with him forever TODAY. And if that urgency isn't there, that could mean there's sin that we need to reconcile. If it's not there, it's not because of something God's done. It might mean that we really need to make room for prayer again, that we need to eliminate that clutter and prepare more than our homes, but our hearts, for the coming Messiah.
  • We should be thankful for John the Baptist and for all those that God sends into our lives, all those holy and heroic men and women, whose lives proclaim the greatness of God, whose lives act like huge arrows pointing to the reality of Jesus Christ. Thank those people in our lives.
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