At Home In Advent

The following words for reflection are taken and adapted from “At Home In Advent - A domestic journey from Advent to Epiphany” from Gordon Giles (BRF - Bible Reading Fellowship). The entire book is available from Eden.co.uk and would be recommended to get a fuller experience of this time of devotion and meditation.

The purpose of these devotional is to give you something of an everyday object or motion which can focus our thinking through Advent. There are 3 sections:

Travelling in Advent
At Home in Advent
The run up to Christmas

This is a journey…

Christmas Jumper: Pulling the wool over our eyes

Read: Luke 12:22 - 31

As many of you are aware I love the ridiculous nature of Christmas jumpers and the like. Every year I get a new one. But I make sure that I get to wear them all throughout the Christmas season. There are too many jumpers bought at Christmas that are worn once and discarded.

Have you ever thought about what a Christmas jumper is made of? 100% wool, or other natural fabric…? How about plastic! These last couple of years the problem of ‘plastic’ has been highlighted and a lot of people are taking steps to do their bit for the environment. It is something that we should also consider when it comes to what we wear and throw away. There are too many unseen plastics.

These words of Jesus remind us that we live in a created world. A world of natural beauty and growth. This is not about buying or not buying a Christmas jumper¹, this is about us stopping to smell the roses and think about who put them there and what we can do as stewards of this place.

How many items of clothing do you have that could be reused or recycled?

Do you spend as much time in God’s word as you do in the wardrobe?

Pray for those who don’t have enough clothing in the cold winter nights.

Last year we started a “jumper swap shop” for those who didn’t have a jumper to ‘borrow’ one and give a small donation to charity. ↩