Advent Week 3

Hope For Those Who are Watching

Monday, December 16

Willow Hambrick

Hope For Those Who Are Watching

Much of how we interpret life depends on how we “filter” our reality.  We are “on watch” literally every waking moment.  We observe others at drive-thru windows, we watch TV, we watch our children grow, and we watch our parents age.  We observe who sits in the pew, and who does not; who takes a radical stand for justice despite great risk, and who sits, sours, and soaks, and merely slogs through life.  We take-in the world, and then make our responses to what we see based on our own unique theological, cultural, political, geographic, sexual, gender-based, and age-based filters.  Therefore, while we are watching, we are interpreting, and judging – and that is reason why we need an infusion of help and hope mixed into all this watching.  We “watchers” inevitably become the “responders”. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr encouraged us to learn to make the most “fitting response” to life, not just our same tired, bias-stained responses.  PhilosopherUmberto Eco once said, "I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."  Little eyes are watching.  Old eyes are watching.  We gain those scraps of wisdom, or the prejudices that bind us – through seasons of observation.  That is how we learn, and that is why we offer either light or darkness to our Jerusalems.  This Advent season, intentionally focus and repair the clarity and purity of your filters.  Doesyour life offer less than fitting responses to both friend and foe because your filters needcleaning or changing?   “Be Thou my vision oh Lord of my heart.  / Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art. / Thou art my best thought by day or by night.  / Waking or sleeping, Thy presence, my light.”

“Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, be brave, be strong.”

I Corinthians 16:13