As we enter into the season of Advent & begin a new Church year we are invited & encouraged to pay attention for the new ways that God comes among us. As we draw closer to our celebration of Christmas when we celebrate the historical coming of Jesus into our world, we start the Advent season by focusing on Jesus’ coming at the end of time. But, Jesus doesn’t just come in the past & sometime in the future. He comes to us now, in the midst of our lives & quite often in some ways, places, & people who & where we might not expect to find Jesus revealing Himself in & through.

  This Advent season, we might invite Jesus to draw us into some of that newness of His coming. Maybe one of the biggest dangers in our spiritual journeys can be the trap of, “I (or we’ve) always done it that way.” We become comfortable with a particular way of worshiping, or praying, or interacting with God or others. We get used to a certain way of being Church or of pretty much anything else in our spiritual lives & then something or someone comes along that shakes that comfortableness up. While the easy response might be to retreat into our comfortable & familiar ways, Jesus also invites & calls us to find Him in the new & the unfamiliar. That’s not to say that we’re called to toss out the comfortable & the familiar, but rather to pay attention for the ways that God might be inviting us to grow or stretching us in the newness that comes about over time.

   I know that God is calling me to newness in my journey with Him & I pray that He is with you as well. Let’s not reject the new, but let’s pray with open hearts & minds, “Come, Lord Jesus, come!” Come in both the comfortable & familiar & in the new & the unfamiliar as well!