Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The Advent Experience: Waiting Quietly

This week we began our new series "The Advent Experience".  We began by discussing what the season of Advent is really all about, and how that differs from how society celebrates the Christmas season.  The main focus of our new series will be the theme of waiting.  We're not very good at waiting, are we?  We live in a culture that is definitely not patient and is always looking for things to happen quickly and instantly.  We have fast food, email, texting, internet on our phones, airplanes, even "fast passes" at theme parks which allow us to skip waiting in lines completely! 

We aren't very good at slowing down either.  We all filled out a "How I Use My Day" questionnaire and learned that very few of us have much spare time on our hands.  We also realized that the majority of our day is noisy!  Some of us even sleep with music or the TV on.  So, we tackled the theme of "Waiting Quietly" this week.  We watched the Nooma video entitled Noise and talked about how uncomfortable we often are with silence.  We read 1 Kings 19:9-13, the story of the prophet Elijah and the still small voice.  Elijah found God not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire...but in the whisper.  Some translations say "in the sound of sheer silence."  During this incredibly noisy time of the year, God calls us to wait quietly and listen for God in the silence.  In response, we each wrote down one non-essential activity that we are spending our time on that we are prayerfully committing ourselves to spend less time on in order to spend more time with God.  So, I want to know how that is going?  What activity are you spending less time on (TV, video games, etc.)?  How are you spending more time with God (praying, reading your Bible, devotions, etc.)?  Comment on this post with your responses.

Join us next Sunday night at 7pm as we learn to "Serve while waiting."

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