A Glimmer of Hope

It’s been a tough week for world peace. Tensions between North and South Korea are severely strained after North Korea launched a deadly artillery attack last week; the war in Afghanistan drags on as U.S. leaders ponder the duration of our presence there; a strategic arms pact with Russia appears to be on hold, at least for now; a new English-language web magazine produced by Al Qaeda entices alienated American Muslims to “attack the enemy (America) with smaller but more frequent operations” that will “bleed the enemy by a thousand cuts;” a 19 year old American-Somali man, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, was accused of trying to blow up a van full of explosives during Portland, Oregon’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony; and we have yet to see the full impact on national security that the newly released WickiLeak documents will have.

Meanwhile, millions of us barreled past Black Friday and then with grand élan, having taken a breather over the weekend, millions more enjoyed the convenience of shopping online for Cyber Monday. And somewhere in all this---oh yes, Sunday--- the first day of Advent lie hidden in the corner of the church house, quiet as a mouse.

If we aren’t intentional, amidst all the crises of our world and the cries from retailers beckoning us to catch the next best buy, we will miss the true celebration around the manger. That’s what Advent is about: taking the time to prepare for Christ. Taken from the Latin word adventus, meaning coming, Advent is observed by many Christians in the West as a way of preparing for the celebration of Christ’s birth 2,000 years ago. Even churches that don’t formally observe Advent have different ways of anticipating the celebration of Jesus’ birth.

The time to do that is now, not December 24th. And that requires something most of us are short on: patience. We do not like waiting on Christ, nor preparing for him. We prefer him to catch up with us. The French philosopher and Christian mystic, Simone Weil, said, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Expectant waiting takes place most often in the quiet, in the secret place of a heart yearning for more than the world can offer. It’s heard in the strained voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
Some eight centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ, when a foreign military superpower, Assyria, threatened tiny Judah’s national security, the prophet Isaiah proclaimed hope in the midst of despair. It may have only been a glimmer, but that was all the hope necessary to give words to his vision of a better day, a time when the nations would “hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” In a day of fear and intimidation, distraction and disarray, dishonesty and corruption, Isaiah, waiting patiently, caught a glint of hope--- eight centuries yet away. But he saw it. And he wouldn’t let it go.
Sometimes small glimmers of hope are all that is necessary to birth a new tomorrow, even when that tomorrow seems an eternity away.
Tempted to despair this Christmas season? Small wonder. It’s the way of our world; the world we know, the world of anxiety, anger, and ultimately annihilation. It’s only in looking away from it that we can gaze into another world, the world within the Word---a strange and mysterious world where miracles happen, where a virgin gives birth to a Savior, where good news announces freedom to captives, hope for the despondent, and light for those dwelling in darkness---the world you’ve longed for, where the songless choir is given the rhythm of joy by which it rejoices with heaven and nature, singing: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”
It’s a world worth waiting for, and as we listen, ever so intently, we can almost see it, faintly, obscurely, dimly, but undeniably there---peeking over the morning horizon: a glimmer of hope. Do you see it?
Life Matters is written by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D. His email is drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com. David’s website is davidbwhitlock.com.

Mistakes along Life's Way

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” so the saying goes, and I might add, “It lasts forever when it’s on the internet.” I have no idea if Rielle Hunter or the eighth grade girl whose boyfriend allegedly sold the nude pictures of herself she sexted (sending sexually explicit messages or photos by mobile phones) him, thought about the implications of what they were doing when they posed, Reille before a professional photographer, the girl before her own cell phone.

If they didn’t then, they have now.

According to Hunter, when she saw the racy photos of herself in GQ magazine, she cried for two hours and found them “repulsive.” Why then did she do it? She claims she went with the flow of the photo shoot and didn’t realize they would publish them. Hmmm. There may be something to her being in the “flow.” After all, she also said it was the “mysterious force” of their “magnetic fields” that brought her and John Edwards, (irresistibly, of course) together.

The eighth grade girl’s boyfriend faces more than unwanted publicity; what he did—selling the pictures for $ 5 a shot---constitutes a violation of child pornography laws. Maybe his girlfriend, like Reille, got caught up in the moment, or was responding to a dare from friends, or was just being plain eighth grade silly---really silly. Whatever she was thinking, I seriously doubt she said to herself, “I’ll send this cool picture of myself naked to my boyfriend so he can sell it to all the other boys for $5, and then the police can come and investigate for child porn, and someday, when the picture is floating out there in cyberspace, one of my own children can look at it and gasp, ‘Mom, you in the eighth grade? This is sooo embarrassing!’”

The fact is, these two incidents remind us of how easy it is to get caught up “in the moment,” disregard consequences, and make poor choices.

We’ve all been there. We didn’t know, did we? We weren’t thinking, were we? We didn’t even realize, did we? Caught up in the moment, the moment got away from us. We’re like Moses, in the Bible, whose brother, Aaron, when asked why he allowed the people of Israel to create the golden calf idol, shrugged his shoulders and responded, “They took off their jewelry and gave it to me. I threw it in the fire and out came this calf!” Caught up in the moment. The magnetic fields. Into the flow.

So, before we condemn these two and others like them for their not-so-admirable actions, we should remember all of us have made foolish mistakes. It doesn’t have to be a photo shoot for a glamour magazine, or selling nude pictures. It can be a suggestively worded text message (“hey, hot stuff”; “how ‘bout it babe”---Jesse James to tattoo model, Michelle “Bombshell” McGee), or a misplaced love note, or an inviting gaze. When we see it for what it truly is, we too, like Rielle, are disgusted with our narcissism, and like the eighth grade boyfriend, we too have capitalized on the mistakes of others.

And for all of us, there is still the hope of healing.

Roy Hobbs, the lead character in The Natural, said, in regard to his shaded past, “I guess some mistakes you never stop paying for.” And he was probably right. Some mistakes can’t be erased. Like an old athletic injury, they hang around, nagging us from time to time.

But, while some mistakes cannot be forgotten, they can be forgiven. And, God, who can sweep up the mistakes of our past and throw them into eternity, allows us, despite our fallenness, to walk straight up on the path he has for us, the path that is often rocky and seldom smooth, complicated and rarely simple, unpredictable and rarely static, the path that because it is shaped by our own mistakes, is uniquely our path, the true path for us, the one we were meant to walk.

Some mistakes you never quit paying for, but it’s often those mistakes that make us uniquely us.


Life Matters by David B.Whitlock, Ph.D., is published weekly. You can visit David’s website @www.davidbwhitlock.com or email him at doctordavid@windstream.net