For the past week, I’ve been blogging every day. I’m delighted and proud about it, actually. I had slipped so far off the wagon of writing, and now I feel I’m back on. I feel like I tricked myself into writing daily, and it’s worked. The best mind games are the ones you play on yourself.

But now it’s the second week of Advent, and my friend and mentor Kurt has challenged me to step up my game. (Well, he didn’t really challenge me. He suggested it, and I guess I challenged myself. More mind games.) Either way, here’s the thing. Starting today, I am going to blog about two ways I saw God’s light shining in my life each day.

So here goes. The first one is really kind of neat. And it’s connected, yet again, to music. I have to set the scene. First off, I’m a Lutheran pastor serving a congregation. That means, among other things, that I lead Sunday worship each week. One part of Lutheran worship is called “the Great Thanksgiving.” It’s a section of the service that comes right before we share Holy Communion. It’s more or less our ritual of preparation for communion. And during the Advent and Christmas seasons, we do the Great Thanksgiving a little differently at my congregation. For the past five years or so we have used something called a “Christmas Carol Great Thanksgiving.” It’s a sung paraphrase of the normal Great Thanksgiving words, set to several familiar Christmas carol tunes. The congregation and I sing back and forth to each other to the tune of “Good King Wenceslas.” Then I sing alone to the tune of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” Then we all join and sing to the tune of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” And so forth. It’s obviously very seasonal, and many people in the congregation really enjoy it and find it meaningful each year.

That’s half of the scene set. The other half is this: this morning I woke up with laryngitis. My voice was shot. I really didn’t feel sick other than a very minor cough, but my voice was all gravelly and scratchy. There was no way I was going to sing the Carol Great Thanksgiving today. So the Minister of Music and I decided that he would still play it to the appointed tunes, and the congregation would still sing, but I would speak my parts.

I channeled my inner William Shatner (who knew I had one?), and did my best “spoken word singing.” I read the words slowly, rhythmically, kind of in line with the music, and kind of freely. It was the best I could do. Well, it turns out it was more than enough. A bunch of people told me afterward that it was amazing, that it was so meaningful hearing the words like that. I am considering doing it this way next week even if my voice is back. That was definitely a sign of God’s light – working through things that seem broken or incomplete or imperfect, making things far better than they should be.

The second place I saw God’s light today is much easier and quicker to explain. This afternoon, a group of us from church braved the rain to go Christmas caroling. We stopped at a local senior apartment building, and then traveled to three of our homebound members’ homes. All of them were so happy to see us, and to hear us. (Maybe not so happy to hear my singing voice today, but there were many others who drowned me out!) I absolutely saw Advent light in the eyes of the folks we visited, as they listened and sang along with us.

That’s where I saw the light of God today, the second Sunday of Advent.

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