Advent 2: Signs of Life

Quotes and information this week drawn from Anna Case-Winters' commentary on Matthew, part of the Belief Series. 

A Blessing for Advent week 2: 
Blessed are you who escaped from the vipers nest. 

Who found yourself growing up in a world that had so thoroughly forgotten the very-goodness baked into its bones and bark that all it offered were tenuous  pathways of escaping calamity with the smell of fire on your heels. And only if you kept on the straight and narrow. 

Blessed are you who found that the ever-elusive path you were told to stick to is actually a fun house affair, where finding the on ramp may be tricky, but once you are on the whole thing opens up stretching before you until the way you are walking becomes the skyline and the desert and the trees. 

Blessed are you who walked away. Knowing a vipers nest is no place to flourish. Who rejected the familiar numbness a low dose of poison can bring, because at the end of the day it’s still poison and grace doesn’t ask us to numb. 

Blessed are you dreamers. Who live in the tension of hoping and working for a world in which we love our enemies, and lions nap in the meadow with lambs and yet…you cannot bring yourself to even turn toward the snake pit from whence you came. 

Time may heal wounds, but this one is not even scabbed over yet and you cannot imagine a day when the mere thought of where you have been won’t rub you like salt.

Blessed are you who live wild  and free in the deserted places. You who feast on the sweetness and absurdity that find you there. Blessed are the ones who have become spectacles for the respectable, as you show us the way back to life.