Rev. Ray and Pat Amos
Luke 2:12
“This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
“JESUS’ BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENT”
Today’s Advent Challenge is to look for the presence of Christ in ordinary lives and places that you have never thought to look before.
A few years back I was sitting at my desk one morning when suddenly I heard a loud boom outside. I went out to see what might have happened, but all seemed okay. Later I remembered that the Space Shuttle was returning to earth, and it was to enter earth’s atmosphere over Tennessee. The morning news confirmed that was what had happened.
Our Lord entered this world with only the sounds of common life. There was no boom to announce the powerful Immanuel, just the sounds of stable animals, hushed voices of a nervous mother and father, and outside, the night life of an overcrowded small town.
A country song has the words, “looking for love in all the wrong places.” While it wasn’t at all about Christ, yet it could be an Advent thought. Many were waiting on the Messiah to come, but no one would have imagined that He was sleeping in their town, in a stable.
John wrote nothing about the birth of Jesus, but he did write that God put on human flesh and came unto his own, and his own knew him not. Do we sometimes miss him because we just don’t expect him to be in the everyday places of common life? “You will find him,” is what the angels said to believing shepherds, yet just a few miles up the road, king Herod with all his resources couldn’t find the newborn Prince of Peace.
Will we, have we, found Christ? It’s a question of the heart. It is not a secret, but just a fact: “You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you…” Jeremiah 29:13-14a
Grace and Peace, Rev Ray
“Link to YouTube Video – While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night
