Send Out Your Light! - An Advent Cry

Light breaking through winter clouds by emmwah-d5kyskq

I have been attempting to keep as deep an interior silence as I can this Advent season, 

  so I have cut out as much unnecessary exterior "noise" as I can to help me

 in my waiting for the new light of Christ to break in on me.

Blogging and facebook were the first to go,

 driven by my longing to see more clearly,

and to make an inner space for the coming of the light.

 Well more accurately my longing is
 to be ignited by a greater light of compassion and love.

Of course what has happened has been a deafening rise in my inner confusion,
 and own dark voice,

with a couple of winter bugs for me and hubby as a back ground accompaniment.

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I am a seasoned traveller on the faith journey,
 so why,  when I set my face to go deeper
 am I always so surprised and seemingly overwhelmed?

Each descent into my own darkness, each waiting out the dark tide, feels so new.

 Even well known paths become uncharted wilderness seen, as they are,

from a new vantage point of time, grace, and experience.

In the outer winter darkness of the world,

other destructive forces have raged and sobbed,

 too terrible to contemplate.

Each news brings appalling facts

 that I can only wish with all my heart did not exist,

 wreaking havoc as they do.

And this news is not new to me,

but familiar echoes of the dark state within which I wait

 for the new light to break within my own heart.

Yet in my waiting gloom something shimmers.

There is the memory of my own story.

The story I have begun to tell, and faltered over,
 leaving it as yet not fully told, (though promising I will),

when going over old suffering proved too much to encompass in the time I have had. 

Can I merely short circuit the full telling of it now by saying,

 at a time when I was desperately sick

a physical and spiritual light broke in on me

 that healed me all the way from the outside in.

The thing I need to say right now is I was no more

 "holy".

nor "righteous",

no more "deserving",

then than I am now,

 and yet the light came.

So I have every reason to believe, and to hope,
 for that same light to come for others.

Unholy, unrighteous, undeserving like me.

And that is the Advent hope,

and the Advent promise.

The people living in darkness have seen a great light;

on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." 

 Matt 4:16

Out of these last days of Advent waiting I offer you the glorious promise that

the darkness of death and evil do not have the last word.

He who is light comes,

even to you and me.

Be Blessed

P.S.  One thing I have maintained in my Advent silence is my faith companion at Ennis Blue. 

 For more glory than you can handle why don't you do the same?