Advent 1 (Wednesday) :: How Might We Wait in Wonder?
Dear friends,
When is a time you remember waiting for something wondrous to happen?
Perhaps the most exciting example from my youth was when it was announced that Walt Disney World was coming to Orlando. It was announced several years in advance, and, as a kid, this news certainly hit home. Our house was just 30 miles away from the proposed location!
Waiting for the Magic Kingdom to open in October 1971 was a wondrous experience.
It quickly became the centerpiece of many news reports, articles, television specials, schoolyard discussions, and family conversations. Billboards, strategically placed along the I-4 corridor, served only to increase the anticipation.
The “Welcome Center” they built in Lake Buena Vista sealed the deal for me. Artist renderings and scale models of the Magic Kingdom fueled my imagination with the promised magic of Disney.
The months building up to the grand opening were filled with awe, mystery, and excitement.
And so today, in this first week of Advent, I find myself asking: What would it be like to experience that same quality of anticipation for the arrival of Christ as I did when I was a little boy, waiting for the Magic Kingdom to arrive?
What would that even look like?
It's not lost on me that the birth of Christ ushers in the coming of its own kind of kingdom, this one crowned with an infant king. Christmas proclaims the promise of an eternal kingdom so wondrous, mysterious, marvelous, and powerful that we hardly have the capacity to comprehend it.
What is the equivalent here, then, of pressing our faces up against glass, watching with mounting excitement as the evidence of the new kingdom's arrival grows? How might we name the evidence of its arrival that we see?
What does waiting in that kind of wondrous anticipation look like for you?
Share your response in the Advent Meditations group.
Until next week, every good wish.
Kirk
Join us . . . Here at Still Forming, we send letters twice a week — on Sundays and Wednesdays — that help you center, savor, pause, and remember who you are. Sign up here: