With my career in youth ministry for the past six years, one of the major things I’ve come to discover about the faith development of young people is that it has so much less to do with being fed the answers, and so much more to do with things like wonder and curiosity.
Lent has a way of interrupting my life. I would even go so far as to say that most years lead up to Lent for me. I suppose that’s the point.
The reason we are so fearful of our sin, the reason we are so hesitant to acknowledge it, is because we are so used to it. We’ve become so accustomed to living a life of sinful patterns that, even though we may pay lip service to wanting to be holy, the fear of letting go of our sinful nature is overwhelming.
Advent is a time and a space for us to prepare for the coming of so many things – Christmas parties, family members, and the new year ahead – but if we are not rooted and fixed on the person of Jesus coming into the world, the chaos that reigns in the month of December threatens to swallow us whole.
I always thought that living a good story meant living a wildly unorthodox life saturated with adventure. For some of us, it does. But perhaps you’re a little more like me – living smaller than you ever thought you would.
We think we are ready for the makeup of our churches to appear more reflective of the image given in Revelation 7:9-10, but are our churches ready to sacrifice “the way things are around here” to invite that diversity?
