“There’s got to be a logical way to explain this Christmas thing.”– Jack Skellington, from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Why did God even come? Why expose God’s very self to the wild elements of humanity: the discomfort, the sickness, the hurt, the sadness, and all that goes along with our soft and vulnerable flesh? At […]
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So much of living well is about waiting well, and this is especially true in the in the lives of those who follow Jesus. We are expectant people, people who long for the renewal and restoration of all things. We are witnesses to the pain and sorrow in our own lives, in the lives of […]
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Maybe you’ve seen it. Maybe you’ve seen it so many times, you have the scene memorized: Buddy the Elf, played by Will Ferrel, is beyond excited that Santa will be coming to the department store. But when Santa arrives and invites a boy onto his lap, Buddy senses that something is amiss. He gets right […]
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The house was quiet. I was sitting on the couch, wrapped up in my favorite blanket, with a book on my lap and a scented candle flickering by the window. I took a sip of my tea, and thought: this is a sacred moment. But was it? Because on the heels of that thought came […]
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Before the angels appeared to the shepherds on the hillside, there had been 400 years of silence. Between the pages of the Old Testament, and the New—a mere second for us to flip—lived a people waiting in anticipation of their Messiah. In those four hundred years, there had been no new word from God, no […]
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Advent is my favorite part of the liturgical year. I didn’t grow up in a church tradition that followed the liturgical calendar, and for years I associated Advent with a countdown to Christmas. But as I’ve discovered in my adulthood, Advent is so much more than a piece of chocolate every day. Rather, it’s an […]
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Last week, we got a toy catalog in the mail from Amazon. It was just like the ads we used to get from Toys R Us, only this one was thicker and glossier. Inside the front cover, there was a card you could tear out labeled “My Holiday Wish List.” I smuggled it into our […]
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Sarah K. Butterfield 