Pastor Dirk has given us a Jesse Tree Advent Devotional to use in our daily Bible readings. What a blessing this is becoming!

The Jesse Tree Advent devotional for Friday encourages us to see Advent as an invitation to prepare our hearts for a Divine encounter, never knowing when or where it might happen. In reflecting on Jacob’s experience of seeing a ladder extending from earth to heaven in a dream, the devotional mentions that Jacob called that place “the house of God” and “the gate of heaven” as a visible reminder of the spiritual encounter.

I’m grateful for this picture for my Christmas decorations and the Advent celebrations. In spite of missing Julia again terribly during the season, I have been decorating my house (her “thing”). At times it deepens my sense of loss and experience of loneliness. But now I have another meaning to attach to the decorating that breathes peace into my soul.

I have looked around and seen the Christmas decorations as a monument to God’s grace and the hundreds of spiritual encounters that Julia and I (and I myself) have had over the years.

The monument becomes an opportunity for the unexpected

But now, more than that, I see them as an opportunity to invite God to do something NEW in my heart and life. And that’s my heart. I want to encounter the Lord Jesus again in a new and deeper way and the decorations are my declaration that this house is “the house of God.”

And so, I pray, trust, and wait for that new encounter with him which might happen today. Perhaps, even now in this reorienting of my thoughts and perspective…