Our All Age Service to mark the start of Advent was entitled “Longing for Light”.
We spent some time thinking about what we are longing for - banal things like what we are longing to receive as a Christmas present, what we are longing to wear on Christmas Day (pyjamas and oodies were the favourites!), what we were longing to eat and drink. But we moved on to think about more profound things - what the world longs for.
We sang a hymn with the first verse:
Longing for light, we wait in darkness
Longing for truth, we turn to You
Make us Your own, Your holy people
Light for the world to see
There seems to me to be a profound truth here. Maybe every year it is the case but our world seems especially dark at the moment. I think we are all struck this year by the need for light, hope and peace in our troubled world.
And so, at our service, we made a commitment. Having identified what it is that we are longing for - for our world, our families, our communities, ourselves etc we made a commitment to pray. Because I believe that we can trust our sovereign God to lighten our darkness, and that often God will do that through us. And so as we long, and as we pray, let us also embody the light God sent into the world, so that as God's holy people others may encounter that light for themselves.
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