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…

Candle: Advent lights

Read: John 1:1 - 15

What do you get if you cross wire coat hangers, tinsel, candles and sticky tape? That’s right, a Blue Peter Advent crown! Many of us will remember these - never made one, but remember it. Trying to light the candles of one of these was always going to be a recipe for disaster. Yet candles and Christmas are partners.

At the family service for Christmas we made Christigles. Basically an orange with a candle in it if you don’t know what one is… Google it, it is really quite a nice thing.

Whether your light is a candle or something more extravagant, Advent and Christmas is a time for lights. Lisburn Council got into a bit of bother over their lights! Too much spent at this time, too many people, not enough access… there was no winning.

Yet people want to see the Christmas Lights.

So maybe this year could be a great opportunity for us, for you and I, to let people see the real Christmas light. The Light has come into the world, but the world cannot understand it. Maybe it’s time for us to take our lights out of our small corners, from under our bowls, from behind that bush and say, “Look over here world. This is the light of the world. He has come and he will come again!”

If you get an opportunity to do so, light a candle in a dark room. How much light does it cast around it? Blow it out. How much more light was there when it was lit?

Pray for those in darkness.