JOURNEY

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If you are reading this, you must be on a journey—one that has led you to wonder about the meaning and mystery of life. Perhaps you have traveled along the way known as Christianity, or maybe you’re aware of something Larger thank yourself but haven’t yet found your way.

Wherever you are on your journey, keep going. You are doing that difficult but necessary work of discovering the truth that Love is the guiding light on this adventure we call life.

If you are on this journey, know that you aren’t alone.
• You aren’t alone in asking your questions.
• You aren’t alone in naming your fears.
• You aren’t alone in stating your doubts.
• You aren’t alone in your wondering about what this all means.

If you are on this path, you join a great cloud of witnesses who have been where you now are. Many have pondered the mysteries of faith in their hearts, including a young woman named Mary. “To ponder” means to think carefully about something. The Mother of God first pondered the announcement the angel made to her in Luke 1.29. The Greek word (what is the Greek word, if you’re going to write this… otherwise, say “In the Greek text, we understand it means she is turning…) means that she is turning things over in her mind. She’s thinking. She’s not a vacant field in which God will plant the seed of the Messiah. She’s not a servant to be ordered around.

Before Mary joins in on the movement that would change the world, she pondered. It was her pondering that opened her up to what God was about to do in the world. While God bestowed the identity of“Favored One” on her as a gift, Mary is the one who claims it for herself and declares her own agency. To answer the question that one song asks: Yes, Mary did know that her child would grow up to continue the movement of love God started long ago.

If you are pondering things in your heart, keep it up. In your resistance to cookie-cut answers to global and theological concerns, God is making Her way to you. Your story matters. In fact, your life—in all the beauty and messiness it contains—can magnify God. God and Mary (like God and us) are co-conspirators, weaving threads of community, lifting up the lowly, feeding the hungry, saving the world. Each person has this same capacity for magnifying the Lord.

If you are reading this, you are on a journey that will lead to the peaceful presence of God. And you, like Mary, are a magnifying glass to help others see God in greater detail and to help see God in a bigger way.

Friend, during this Advent season leading to Christmas, take time to ponder and to turn things over in your mind. In a culture that thrives off of quick fixes and pithy promises, sit in the mystery. If you need a place to ask your questions, to name your fears, to state your doubts, and wonder about the perplexity of faith, we have a place for you at First Presbyterian Church.

After all, it was in the unknowing that Mary ushered in the coming of The One who Knows.

Adam Quine/First Presbyterian Church in Lincoln

 

 

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