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Advent Devotional for Saturday, December 18
This past summer, I laced up my hiking boots and undertook the experiential learning course, “An Adventure in Wilderness Spirituality,” taught by professor Bill Greenway. Fifteen days of no watches, calendars, computers, iPhones, or music. Nothing that connected our class of six students to the outside world came with us into the mountains. After a few days, we lost track of the concept of time. Numbers on a watch face became irrelevant to the living of that day. We woke when the sun rose, ate when we were hungry. We sat around the campfire at twilight. We went to sleep when it was dark. Simple. Attuned. Connected to nature and one another. We attended to the sun to guide our daily rhythm. By awaiting and attending to the natural ordering of creation, we connected with a reality greater than that constructed by our own sense of self-importance. The world grew when my calendar was not the center of my cosmos.
To wait upon and attend to something greater than your own self is a spiritual discipline. In this season of Advent, we learn that waiting upon the coming of Christ attunes our hearts and souls to the holy ordering of life. We wait on Christ so that he becomes greater and we become less. Christ becomes the center of our daily living as we enter again into the Kairos ordering of time. When God’s ordering of the seasons of life takes the place of our own, we are unleashed from the bounds of this world and freed to cherish the simple miracles of life. A conversation with a friend. The smell of coffee. Warm socks on a cold morning. So we wait upon Emmanuel, God with us, as we tune our hearts to the reality of Jesus Christ.
God of Creation, in whom we live and move and have our
being, dwell with us in the rhythms of life. Tune our hearts to the needs of others. Enable our anxious minds to wait in peace, and awaken us to a reality bigger than ourselves — a reality centered in Christ. Amen.
John Leedy
Student Senate President and senior MDiv student from Abilene, Texas
For the glory of God and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a seminary in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition whose mission is to educate and equip individuals for the ordained Christian ministry and other forms of Christian service and leadership; to employ its resources in the service of the church; to promote and engage in critical theological thought and research; and to be a winsome and exemplary community of God's people.
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