December 10, 2023 – Advent, week 2

Re-read today’s story, from a different version than you usually use. Biblegateway.com has many versions. Try The Message, New Living, The Modern English (updated KJV), or the Amplified. Hearing God’s word in new ways can open our heart to new truths.

Consider again one of the questions from this morning’s sermon: Who do you look at every day…and no longer see?

Here are some suggestions for inviting God to help us see with his eyes.

• Take a walk with a friend, your family, or a neighbor. Talk those you see, pray for them, and those in the neighborhood.
• Drive home a different way, intentionally trying to see the world around you. Contemplation helps us enter into God’s flow of love: This new way of seeing and being can help us shift from transactional to transformational.
• Enter into a familiar place – a coffee shop, your office, your school – and ask God to help You see, hear and know His love for His children there.
• Find a kaleidoscope and spend a few minutes in contemplative silence taking in the world through this lens. This helps us to be receptive to these moments of beauty, opening us up the way we experience the world

This prayer, by David Adam, is one way to pray, inviting God to help us to hone our senses with God’s word and presence:

Open my eyes, that I may see Your presence, in others, always around me.
Open my ears, that I may hear Your voice—yes, it’s quiet, and very near.
Open my heart, that I may know the love of my God, close and real.
Open each sense, make me aware of Your power and peace, always there.