Advent – Day 4
Dec 04 in Advent
Emmanuel means ‘God with us’. Advent is all about preparing a place within our heart where He may dwell … His Joy, His Love, His Hope, His Peace. Getting our priorities right and not getting caught up in the busy-ness and commercialisation of the season, but looking to simplify life (quality not quantity) and spend it on things that are truly important at this time. Making memories that will last and making the best use of our time.
It is so easy to place demands upon ourselves, I know I can become my own worst enemy many times missing out on time that could be better spent. I was walking the dog the other day with a thousand thoughts shooting through my mind ‘remember to’ ‘must not forget’ ‘appointment to’ ‘need to’ ‘must do”air strikes in the Middle East’…. I then realised how ‘busy’ my mind was! I stopped in my tracks and just listened for a while; I could hear the traffic close by, everyone rushing to reach the goals they had set for that day, planes flying over with more people with more meetings and schedules and busy lives until in the midst of all the going on’s I heard a confident ‘tweet’ I looked around to see a small bird hopping from branch to branch, careless and free he was also putting the world to rights, I smiled as I followed him. I was so glad I had stopped those few minutes to breathe in that precious moment.
We can get caught up doing things that seem urgent yet are unimportant, missing out on the things that are important yet not urgent. It is all about not doing the ‘good’ at the expense of the ‘best’. To silence all the voices that bombard us all day long and take time out to think and savour a few precious moments.
Our pastor at Church spoke to us once about this, he told us to write a list of all the things we needed to do, mark them into urgent and non-urgent, then go through them again and mark them into important and not important. Once finished this exercise, we were to do the urgent and important ones first, secondly the important ones. By which time we would find that those marked urgent yet unimportant might not be so urgent after all, leaving the non-urgent and non-important to the very last (if at all).