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Perhaps it’s just me but these Advent readings seem to be loaded with inspiring images and life-changing awarenesses.  All of it very simple. Very very simple. So simple that children who naturally and naively live with open eyes and ears get it, when we adults presuming complexity and hidden agendas, too often miss the point.

I noticed it in the first three words of today’s first reading: “a shoot springs” and that got me back to the remarkable evidence and inspiration in the world of nature.

Look at this image (on my camera roll), a tree that I had sawn back to a bare stump a few weeks ago. Surely it would die? Yet new life emerges. A shoot springs.

Remarkable.

Yes, the miracle of life, and more often than not we are caught up in the routines and demands of life that our eyes and ears are closed to the miracles around us and therefore too often oblivious to the miracles in us.

As the Isaiah reading continues, for those who can truly see and hear with the openness of a child, that is with “knowledge of the Lord,”  “The wolf lives with the lamb, the panther lies down with the kid, calf and lion feed together, with a little boy to lead them”.

To continue with my own experiences in recent days… enemies begin to speak to one another, a grieving partner senses new hope and possibilities after months of feeling hopeless, I look back on a past hurt and realise that I have forgiven, the dawn comes after a long night, the feared encounter doesn’t happen.

You will have your own “shoot-springing” experiences.

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Take an initiative and send me a date time and place for a FFF cafe-catchups. john@fff.org.nz. I’ll advertise these on each morning’s post throughout Advent.