Advent Devotional - Day 23

Monday, December 21
1 John 4:8, 4:16, 3:16, John 15:9-13

There are particular somethings about you that bring delight to both God and others. The way your cheek curves, the scatter-color flash of your eyes, how the breeze seizes your hair and soars, be that beard or billow or buzz. The ways in which you walk and smile, each moving and speaking of the journey you’ve taken to get here. Within your body and your person, you are a sensory celebration, someone intentionally breathed into being by love. For God is love, and our God breathes life.

Speaking of breathing, you do that in your own unique way as well. Your laugh is also your own, and what a gift it is to hold and behold it! What joy it is to be the cause of it, to share in it, to help weave it together in summer, winter, spring, or fall, each season found within the hands of the God who turns us and its pages. Whether that laughter is bark or gut-level guffaw, bitter or joy-soaked sunlight, God and others laugh when you laugh, pause when you pause, and together sing the life of it. We laugh in love for each other, for God is love, and our God laughs with us.

Whether you know it, believe it, or have even considered it, what you are shaped by, marked by, fueled by, and made for is love. You are deeply, inescapably beloved, loved in every bright electrical arc stretching between your synapses, light and fire snapping across the space between atoms, the soft thump of your feet slapping pavement, toes sinking into grass, or heels striking the road. You are loved as you quietly stand or as you run, as you dance, and even as you slump wearily to your knees. You remain in the love of a God who has made you, finds joy in you, and desires that your own joy would be complete. Our God is love, and you are made for it, love made greater, bright fire, aglow in a world made lighter by your presence and the love you echo to others.

Reflection by Adam Baker