What do you think it means to prepare the way of the Lord? If God sent a messenger to prepare that way, then I’d think the preparation must have been as important as the arrival. If you think about it, there are lots of things for which preparation is so essential that without it, or if the prep is improperly done, you can get into trouble. For example, suppose you get to the end of the semester in school and it’s time to take the final exam, but you haven’t attended most of the classes and you haven’t studied. Taking that final exam would probably produce a lot of anxiety! I used to have that dream near the end of the term every year that I was in school. That’s a lot of anxiety dreams.

John, whom we call the Baptist, received mission instructions directly from God to proclaim the importance of repentance. And repentance simply means turning back toward God. When the prophet Isaiah foretold that mission, he described John as “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” (Luke 3:4-6)

And Malachi’s prophecy is similar: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight– indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” (Mal. 3:1-2a)

These prophecies about the messenger who prepares the way of the Lord don’t sound like messages about joyful preparation for the arrival of a new baby. They sound like warnings. “But who can endure the day of his coming?” Yikes!

It kind of makes you think– Advent has a bit more to it than preparation for Christmas Day– the celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. However we are all trained to think of Advent as the appetizer before the main course– a season to whet our appetites for Christmas. And that’s not really our fault. Christmas has been marketed to us as a completely different cultural celebration for our entire lives. We have been manipulated into thinking about it in exactly the same way people contemplating marriage have been taught that diamonds last forever. They don’t. And we don’t have to reject that other Christmas– the one that must have awe-inspiring lights, a perfectly conical tree that is pre-lit with LEDs that are programmable in five different color patterns, and stockings hung by the chimney with care. I love that Christmas as much as you do. And I love running around my home decorating, staying up too late, and scheming about how I can improve over last year’s decorations. AND… I also love that God is so near to us as to choose to live within us. So why wouldn’t I celebrate both Christmases without having to toss out either one?

I prepare for both holidays– they just have different preparation. For cultural Christmas, I decorate the house with those little Christmas village things my dad gave me when my folks downsized to a condo. I bake, go to parties, hang up lights, and cajole the family into helping me hang up red and silver balls on the tree.

For the other holiday, the one where we celebrate Christ coming into the world, I prepare differently because there are no decorations for that. It’s kind of the opposite, like what you do before decorating. You put away the harvest wreath and the pumpkins and gourds, and you clean, putting things in order in preparation for what is to come.

During Advent, we prepare for the arrival of the messiah, or ready ourselves to receive the Christ consciousness into our hearts by doing the same things. We put our hearts in order, and we do the things we say we will do in our baptismal covenant– renounce evil and other distractions and turn our attention back to God, expectantly awaiting the “Lord whom we seek [who] will suddenly come to the temple.” (Mal. 3:1). We ARE that temple! And who can endure the day of his coming? We can– because Christ has promised us never to let go of our hands in the middle of the street: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20).

The days between now and the conclusion of Advent aren’t that many. Soak them in and savor this time because each one is a gift: the raw materials with which you can leave a legacy of memories for someone else. Whether it’s the cultural time leading up to secular Christmas with silly songs, lots of cookies and ugly sweaters, or it’s that special time where we put away the things that we don’t need in the season of anticipation of the coming of Christ consciousness into our own hearts– Advent; you can have both. But don’t confuse one with the other, because this is where we live and how we must live: one foot in this world and the other in the kingdom of God.

When I read that Jesus once said, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves,” (Luke 21:25-26) I took him literally and started looking for the signs in the sun, the moon and the stars. Because you know what? The heavens really do declare the glory of God! And I love astrobiology and planetary science. But honestly, I think Jesus was not talking about science. So what else can celestial objects tell us, and what are these signs so we can recognize them?

Sometimes I wonder if people used to be more sensitive to the signs through which the Holy Spirit communicates, but maybe we’ve grown unaccustomed to reading them. Maybe the continual bombardment of electromagnetic radiation from broadcast television, radio, satellite internet and cellular telephones has created interference that makes it hard to see signs and symbols that we humans didn’t create.

Advent is a special time to brush up on the language skills that help us to interpret the signs in the sun, the moon and the stars, not to mention the signs of distress on Earth among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. Because if we think about what kind of signs prompted Mary, Elizabeth and the still-in-utero John the Baptizer to recognize that the baby Mary carried was to be hope for all of humanity, you’ve got to think that they must have been really potent signs!

And one imagines that it was an equally special type of literacy that prompted Joseph to marry a young woman pregnant by someone else, or that threatened Herod to the extent that he was willing to kill all of the innocent babies that could possibly grow to challenge him. And what about the three wise men that set off to follow a star that would lead them to the new-born king of God’s plan for the redemption of all humanity?

Maybe these signs are common, and I wish I could read them. But I haven’t forgotten that I was off studying the stars and planets when the Holy Spirit grabbed me and said, now it’s time for you to come and serve my people. So I wonder: maybe my heart can read signs that my mind can’t interpret? What if we have to slow down the turning gears in our heads to see the signs that God places in our paths?

After all, if Jesus said, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life,” (Luke 21:34), then maybe he was trying to tell us that things that affect the mind distract the heart from functioning so that it can’t see the language of holy signs. When we put our energy into trying to grasp incomprehensible things that cannot be understood with our minds, perhaps our hearts aren’t free to do the important work of interpreting the signs that only the heart can understand?

One of my favorite illustrations of this theory was illustrated in the 2002 science fiction thriller Signs by M. Night Shyamalan. While the film genuinely is a scary movie, with evil space aliens come to do harm to earthlings, it’s also a redemption story. The main character is a fairly broken man who has walked away from being an Episcopal priest, having been unable to resolve his grief and his anger at God over the death of his wife in a traffic accident. Now working as a farmer, Graham Hess is just trying to raise his two kids and hold it together. Completing the family is Graham’s younger brother, a minor league ball player who failed because of a propensity to “choke” under pressure.

The audience has the opportunity to eavesdrop on the cryptic last words of Graham’s wife, spoken to him as she died: “See Graham, see,” and a message for his brother, “Swing away Merrill!”

As the story plays out, Graham finds crop circles and other portents of an evil presence in his rural town, including an alien and ethereal figure hiding in his corn field. We learn that aliens with malevolent intent have appeared on the earth, and we see Merrill and Graham’s two children watching television coverage of a family video of a birthday party in Brazil where an alien figure is captured on camera, striding by in the background behind the partying.

Graham’s redemption comes in three parts. First, he visits the man who accidentally killed his wife in the auto accident, and he forgives him. The man also reveals that he has discovered the aliens do not like water, so he is heading to a lake to seek safety. As the invading aliens become a personal threat to Graham, Merrill and his young children, getting into their family home, we see Graham in absolute terror, struggling to save his family. His wife’s last words return to haunt him again, and in a flash of insight, he really does see, recognizing that glasses of water his little girl has left around the house may be their salvation. He tells Merrill to swing away with a baseball bat in the family living room, and Merrill, steps up to his most important “at bat” ever and smashes the glasses of water into the alien, killing it. That’s redemption part 2: Graham has learned to read signs with his heart, and not his head. And Redemption #3? Graham forgives God, realizing that the signs were God’s gift through his wife’s love for him and their family. Signs are spoken and heard in love. I’ll add that Graham’s act of forgiving the man who accidentally killed his wife also produced the information about how to best the aliens. Clearly forgiveness also paves the path to redemption.

Well that’s a very quick and drafty summary of Signs, the film, but it should be enough to make the point. Not everything that God has to say to us can be understood with logic. And just because God has offered us redemption in the person of Jesus Christ, it doesn’t mean that people won’t “faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,” (V.26). What it does mean is that we can “Stand up and raise [our] heads, because our redemption is drawing near.” Not near as in soon– but near as in location: here. The kingdom of God is not out there– it is here. The signs are just like traffic signs on the road, and to see them you have to be moving, following the way of Jesus.

Hold your heads up so you can see the signs– the signs that can only be understood with your hearts.

If I were to compile a list of all of the things for which I am grateful, it would be a very long list. My life is pretty awesome, and as I contemplate that there are far fewer days before me than have already passed, I ask myself, what might I do differently to experience even more joy in the days that lie ahead?

While I’m inclined to say “nothing” because I feel so full, there is one thing: I’d worry less. After all, the Bible says about a zillion times that we should not worry, but habits form quickly, and they are so hard to break. One of the advantages of aging is that it offers the perspective of hind-sight so one can assess what worked and what didn’t. I can tell you that there has never been a single event in my life, good or bad, where worrying helped me a single bit. I can also report that there have been quite a few times where worrying actually made things worse. So when Jesus says, “I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear,” [Matt. 6:25] I know from experience that it’s as true now as when he said it. I’ll bet you know it, too. Worrying doesn’t prevent bad stuff from happening and neither does fear. So the good news is that you can let go of both.

The Holy Scriptures and life experience inform us all that neither worry nor fear are good for us, and the reason they are not useful emotions is because they cloud our judgment and prevent us from working together with the Holy Spirit to navigate the many challenges that we all face in our lives. It’s not that we should never feel concern—that’s something else. When Jesus said, “do not worry about your life,” he was saying worry would not help. He was saying, “hang on a minute—if you get your priorities right, that will help you face whatever you must face in this life.” Food and drink and clothes— of course you need them, but “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well,” [Matt. 6:33]. The gospel message that directs us not to worry is a message that says, “do things in the right order, and the rest will more easily fall into place. Jesus was clearly telling us to be good systems engineers! Just kidding, but his advice is as good for navigating the vicissitudes of the Department of Motor Vehicles as it is for putting Thanksgiving Dinner together or for sending a spacecraft to Mars.

When you realize that our creator is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of steadfast loving kindness, then why would we worry or have fear? After all, “If God is for us, who is against us?” [Rom:31].

So what do we do to stop worrying ourselves into a long list of stress-induced illnesses? I offer the same solution that the Bible offers from the Old Testament to the New, again and again: be glad and rejoice. Be grateful. It won’t keep bad stuff from happening altogether, but gratitude will help you navigate big pot holes in the road when you encounter them, and help you recover more quickly. Gratitude changes everything.

OK, so maybe you’re thinking, ah, that’s just a bunch of biblical platitudes. She can’t possibly know what I’ve faced in MY life. Or maybe you’re from Missouri, and you’d like me to show you. OK.

Psychotherapist and author Amy Morin lists some scientifically based arguments on behalf of the beneficial effects of gratitude in a 2015 article in Psychology today. I’d like to share some of them with you. In a 2014 study published in the psychology journal Emotion, it was reported that gratitude paves the way to more and better relationships. It is also known that as people age, those who maintain a good network of relationships live longer and with better quality of life.

Gratitude is also found to improve physical health and fitness. In a 2012 study from the journal Personality and Individual Differences people who reported regularly feeling grateful had fewer aches and pains, were more compliant about preventative doctor visits, and were more motivated to exercise, which has its own benefits. A 2011 study that was published in the scientific journal Applied Psychology: Health and Well Being notes that people who keep a gratitude journal slept better and longer. Perhaps my favorite studies about gratitude show that it improves mental toughness and resilience. A 2006 study from the journal Behavior Research and Therapy showed that veterans of the Vietnam War with high levels of gratitude showed a statistically significant lower rate of post-traumatic stress disorder than veterans who did not feel they had much to feel grateful about. A 2003 study showed a similar resilience following the trauma of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center among those who recognized that they have much for which to be thankful.

I’m not going to go through examples of what worry and anxiety can do to your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health, because I don’t want you to hang on to that. Let’s just say that when I did a World Wide Web search in Google, I found over 7 million articles, 177,000 of which were scholarly publications. So back to our awesome God.

Jesus said, “I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” Even if I hadn’t already lived a goodly number of years to know I could trust that advice on the basis of experience, why wouldn’t we listen to Jesus when he said, “your heavenly Father knows that you need these things”? It doesn’t mean sit there and do nothing to help yourselves or one another. It means go to God first. As Jesus said “Strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Gratitude changes everything.