Advent is a time of waiting. In the mania of all that the Christmas season has become, it seems impossible to make time for anything, much less to practice this waiting for Jesus’ birth. This advent Grace Church UMC and Lumina Arts Incubator have created a special interactive devotional to help us make space and time for the spiritual practices of prayer, scripture study, and general quiet time with God during the most wonderful (i.e. hectic) time of the year.
I’ve written about it a lot— through Lumina Arts Incubator, a ministry of Grace Church, I have spent time working with artists from all different walks of life, who identify all over the spiritual-religious spectrum. What I love most about this work is watching people connect with their creativity, and exploring together how that intersects with spirituality. We hold weekly small group workshops around Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” that posits God as an artist and, poignantly, that God loves artists. This devotional brings together beloved carols with Scripture, a celebration of how artists call us closer to Christ through poetry and music, and is written by the faith community of Grace Church, including our Artist’s Way groups.
Starting on tomorrow, the first day of Advent, I will be sharing a post each day. I encourage you to join me and our community, as we find time each day to spend in quiet solitude. Each entry will include a carol and scripture excerpt for each day, followed by the short devotional. Click the “listen here” link to listen to a specially curated recording of each carol on spotify. You can follow the Lumina Arts @ Grace Playlist on Spotify here for bonus music.
Following the listening session, close with a prayer, either the one printed at the bottom of each day’s entry or a prayer of your own.
As the little-known Wexford Carol says: “Good people all this Christmas time/consider well and bear in mind/what our good God for us has done/in sending His beloved son.” It is my prayer that this devotional will help us all do that, to create space for the tiny child, born again in our hearts, here to save the world. What have we been waiting for?