So this morning, as I was doing my morning devotions, it occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged last night. I completely forgot. We had something of a minor family emergency last night (nothing for anyone to worry about, but it threw the night’s schedule off significantly), and my Advent blogging completely passed me by. (That’s why there’s no “Advent Light Day 11” post. At the risk of repeating myself from a few days ago, when I gave myself the grace to skip blogging, I’m going to claim self-forgiveness as one of today’s signs of God’s light. Forgiving myself is something that does not come easy to me. Failing to forgive myself is a real strength of mine, real “classic Mike” stuff. So the fact that I can let go of feeling guilt for missing yesterday is a real step for me. Like I said to my therapist the other day, “I would like to be able to say, ‘There I go again,’ and move on.” Well, dear readers, there I go again. Moving on…

The second place I saw Advent light today was in the sermon I was crafting for the upcoming Blue Christmas service I’m leading in a few days. This is a special service we host every year, designed especially for those who find the holidays difficult. Often that’s people who have lost a loved one in the past year, but other people attend as well. I always find this service to be powerful to me, because I find that there’s a side of Christmas that always feels “unnaturally joyful” to me. It seems to paper over the suffering that some people feel this time of year, or the suffering that some people feel in general. I find that I’m able to focus completely on the side of Christmas that means so much to me – the pure grace and presence of God in our world, the light shining in the darkness. Blue Christmas allows me to talk honestly about the darkness, and then honestly about the hope of the light that shines there.

So anyway, this year I discovered that a particular classic Christmas song has an interesting story behind it, and that the lyrics we all know today are not the original lyrics. I’m not going to reveal what that song is today, because I’ll be posting my Blue Christmas sermon here on Sunday. You can read it then. (But feel free to guess in the comments!) Suffice to say for now, I found the original lyrics to contain within them a very intriguing sign of God’s Advent light.

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

Image by Lynda Smith from Pixabay