Don't take God for granted.

"What, then, will this child be?" Lk 1:66

Sometimes, especially when we are busy, we take God, family, friends and faith for granted. We rush about internally and externally trying to get everything done, often enough out of pride. We want everything just right and will be disappointed in ourselves if it isn't. Perhaps that is why today's gospel is about John the Baptist's birth. John is the one who will "prepare the way of the Lord," in clear and unambiguous ways. Reform your lives, he will shout. Clean up your lives. Stop living as if nothing matters but your own safety and pleasure. Our task, John insists, is to sweep the roads, filling in potholes and smoothing out rough spots, so the Lord can enter human history, but  because we often forget this, John, like all good prophets, yells at us.

A few days ago, while working on a homily for Christmas, my computer beeped, alerting me that another email had arrived. Glancing down I noticed it was from an old friend so I opened it immediately only to learn that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Shocked and alarmed, I put aside my homily writing and prayed for a few moments. The clutter of trying to write the perfect homily vanished quickly as I sat in solidarity with my friend. 

John the Baptist was right. I was living in a bubble as I prepared for Christmas and someone had to yell at me to stop. Almost immediately, as I cleared my desk and my heart, other friends came to mind. Two husbands whose wives had died this year, a woman struggling for years to get pregnant without success, a young couple with twins less than a year old and pregnant with another set of twins. 

Honestly, only when we push aside the frantic grasping after all manner of "stuff", do we realize that God is always with us, and it is only our willingness to pause in the middle of the mess that alerts us to the presence of light. Even as I prayed I for friends in distress, I also gloried in the birth of ababy to a couple who thought they would never have a child, and I rejoiced with 100's of people who work together with my brother, sister in law and their family to send out almost a thousand care packages to soldiers far from home at Christmas. As God's people we need to walk with the light of Christ through the darkness and fear within which so many live so that all will know God is our light in all circumstances. Only then will our joy be authentic and deep. Only then will be ready for the Christmas that happens everyday.

Today ask God not to be afraid of the dark.