From John Eldredge...

I can't take credit for writing it but I think it is vital to share.

"I’ve come to notice over the years that I need to pray over Christmas. Seems silly, but then again, our joy is opposed and the enemy hates us celebrating Jesus in any form, hates the love of friends and families, hates hopefulness. So, a heads up: Do pray for your Christmas, and the days around it. I want it to be good for you. Pray for us as well, that our staff is filled with the joy of God, that our days are protected.

It’s the third week of Advent, and with that I am thinking about Jesus’ next Advent, that is, his coming again. I was sharing with some folks yesterday that back in the ‘70s, when I became a Christian, it seemed like talk about Jesus’ return was pretty common. I thought it was a central part of the Christian life, the hope of Christ coming back. But the years passed, and folks don’t seem to talk about Jesus coming back hardly at all anymore. I don’t think its been good for our hearts. Our hopes are too short-range, and vulnerable. Just as our faith needs to be anchored in the fact that he did come for us, and not constantly held up for question with each new turn of events (will he come now?), so our hope needs to rest in the fact that he is coming again, and will usher in a Kingdom that fulfills all our deepest longings and then some. As George MacDonald wrote, “We may say to ourselves, one day these souls of ours will blossom into the full sunshine, when all that is desirable in the commonness of daily love, and all we long for of wonder and mystery and the look of Christmastime will be joined in one, and we shall walk as in a wondrous dream yet with more sense of reality than most of our waking joy now gives us.” So, I’m letting this Advent season be a time to reflect on his first coming, and on his second. Christmas is beautiful because it speaks of the coming Kingdom."