Advent

During this season of Advent, we have been taking turns preparing an Advent meditation for Sunday evenings. We sing Christmas carols together and light the candles of the Advent wreath. Bethany and Larissa have also been busy in the kitchen baking Advent cookies every week with real butter flown in from Kampala specifically for Christmas.

This Sunday was bittersweet for me for a lot of reasons. We are now a team of four people, and since John and Phil had been our guitar players in Michael's absence for the past several weeks, it was hard to not to miss them. I was also missing the Masso family, Kim, Melissa, and all the voices that have been a part of our Sunday worship in different seasons of our team.

This week I lit the candles in the Advent wreath, and as I was moving around the wreath I was hit hard by the realization that after we light the Christmas candle I will have only a little over a week left in Mundri. The wreath seemed more like a painful reminder of the fact that I will soon be leaving the place I now call home.

As we continue to pray for peace and justice in Sudan in this season of Advent, I was also filled with hope and joy as we sang carols about the Prince of Peace.

O come, Desire of Nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid thou our sad divisions cease,
And be thyself our King of Peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

During dinner we were listening to Andrew Peterson's album called Behold the Lamb of God: the true tale of the coming of Christ. If you haven't heard it before, I highly recommend you buy the album. I was encouraged especially by the song "Deliver Us" which was inspired by the years silence between Malachi and the New Testament.

"Our sins they are more numerous than all the lambs we slay
These shackles they were made with our own hands
Our toil is our atonement and our freedom yours to give
So Yahweh, break your silence if you can "
~ Deliver Us, Andrew Peterson

Anyway, those are just some of my unrelated thoughts from the third Sunday of Advent. I pray you will all encounter Christ in new and real ways this Advent season!