Belmont University Advent GuideSample

As I write this devotional, I’m sitting at a coffee shop, hunched over my notebook, bleary-eyed, scribbling away in the midst of my exhaustion. I’m tired, tired to my bones; my mind is muddled, my heart is overflowing with joy. A muddled mind, bleary eyes, and joy do not often go together, but I am a new father. So, this is the terrain I am walking with my wife at this point, three weeks into our new journey as parents of a baby boy.

Just as Advent is a time of anticipation and hope, as we wait together for the arrival of Christ, so too my wife and I have recently been in our own time of anticipation, waiting with hope for our baby boy to be born. In those months of waiting, our hearts were being prepared for the arrival of our son, Aidan Russell McAbee, who joined us September 12th of this year.

As I held Aidan in my arms that first night, I said to him over and over, this bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, “You are a child of love; you are a child of God. You are a child of love; you are a child of God.” As I looked at him, I thought to myself, if God loves me like I love this little boy, then I am more loved than I have ever known. And, of course, that is true; I know that in my mind, but to know ourselves, to know in our bones, that we are loved by the majestic God of this universe . . . what a notion.

In the Scripture we read for today, from Isaiah 6, the call narrative of that ancient Israelite prophet whose name the book’s title bears, we hear the angelic creatures in temple singing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” How beautiful our Lord, that he comes to us high and lifted up, that he comes to us in our very human loves, that he comes to us each year again as the Christ child. May the love of God be felt in your heart and in your bones this season, in your muddle-mindedness, in your exhaustion, and may in the midst of it all, your heart overflow with joy. Amen.

Donovan McAbee
Assistant Professor of Religion and the Arts