Everyone is encouraged to explore All Creation Waits, a devotional for children and adults. It explores the idea that animals from foxes to deer wait for the hope of spring and new life just as God promised the coming of Jesus Christ. Copies are available in the Gathering Area; a donation of $10 is requested (if you give online or with a check, please note “devotional” in the memo line.)
Here is how the author, Gayle Boss, describes the origins of the work:
“When our first son was a toddler I wanted to add an Advent calendar to our family’s Advent practices. But there were none to be found. There were calendars with pictures of gift packages, candy canes, and reindeer behind the cut-out doors. And there were calendars with a thumbnail-size cast of the Nativity. Christmas calendars, all of them, not Advent calendars. Researching its liturgical history, I’d learned that Advent is far richer than a tease-taste of Christmas. It’s a time for soul work, a time to face the losses that a season of darkness and cold brings, a time to feel our ache for the coming of light and warmth, new life and hope.
“Wanting my son to grow up with this deeper, richer experience of Advent, I had no choice but to make my own Advent calendar. What pictures would I draw behind the little doors? What images would deliver to our hearts the wisdom that the dark, cold season is real, but not an end? Just as I was asking that question, my son’s godmother—who didn’t know about my project—sent me her reflection on Painted Turtle as a symbol for how a healthy soul might respond in a dark time. Ah-ha! My son loved pictures of animals! Behind door number 1, I drew a turtle, buried in the mud. Quickly animals queued up to be included. Behind door number 2, a diamond-skinned snake. Then a bear, a doe, a loon….
“Almost twenty years later, I wrote All Creation Waits. Like the Advent calendar, it hopes to convey the wisdom that animals of the northern hemisphere know in their bones, the truth at the heart of the Christ story: The dark is not an end, but a door. It’s the way a new beginning comes.”
For reflections from Pastor Grechen and Pastor Jackson on the message of All Creation Waits, see the Advent issue of Salt & Light.