Monday's Healing Moment

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How often I have thought that joy, happiness, even peace could be manufactured through my will and efforts. It was simply having an occasion to make it happen, lots of planning, controlling and great expectations would make it possible for ‘me’ to orchestrate the joy and hope of Christmas. Instead, I have been disappointed, even exhausted from ‘my’ efforts which often fall short or fail. The serenity and hope of the season is God’s gift, the spiritual gift is received through surrender. The growth needed is planted in the dark, cold, hard dirt of life. Tiny, tough seeds shoved into the earth and swallowed up, waiting in fallow ground, trusting the season until new growth springs from nothingness.

Now the third week of Advent and we draw closer to the birth of the Christ child, still waiting as the days grow colder, shorter, and more stressful. In today’s reading in Luke the angel Gabriel is sent to a Virgin to deliver troubling news to a fearful young girl. Mary questions how she can have a child growing within her, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” The angel tells her that, not only Mary, but her relative Elizabeth who has been barren, also expects a child. Before departing the angel succinctly answers, “For nothing will be impossible for God.”

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~ debra.

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Readings

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Numbers 24:2-7, 15-17 • Psalms 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9 • Matthew 21:23-27.

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#canigetanamen #advent #lovebeingcatholic