18/01/2025
 Here is a reflection that Michael Lessard (Rev. Michael Lessard) wrote for the Praise & Worship Center during advent. I believe it carries a message to inspire hope all year long…
Transitions are difficult, moving, sickness, losses, and personal changes are just a few of the challenges we all face; it’s what it means to be a human being.
Advent is a transitional time where we wait for what we have already experienced.
Jesus has come and redeemed us,
but yet we wait for His return.
For me, Advent is a season where I struggle the most because it usher’s in the season of transition.
I don’t like to wait. It signifies that something or someone else is about to change and
that I am not in control. It will arrive but I don’t know when, which puts this time squarely on someone else’s ability to perform, to fulfill promises and expectations.
We wait for that package to arrive,
that check in the mail, for a friend to recover from illness. We come face to
face with change, and hope it is not too difficult or overwhelming.
John chapter 9: 1-40 gives us an insight in Jesus healing of the blind man.
Jesus takes dirt and mixes it with His saliva and makes a paste that He places on the man’s eyelids and tells him to go and wash his face.
Change has happened but the blind man has to wait and wash his face.
He had to do something while he waited.
He had to get himself to the pool of
Siloam, which was not easy for a man who could not see. (Jn: 9: 6-8)
He somehow got there,
and washed his face and he was healed. Transitions are the clay;
the dirt of our struggles with life’s most difficult realities.
In Genesis 2:7 God fashions man from the dirt, the building block of DNA the stuff of creation.
The sin of Adam and Eve blocked the original
relationship between creation and God’s purposes. Now they had to wait for the harvest, now they had to toil and hope that the earth would cooperate with their need for food and water.
Now they had to hope that the elements would not fight against them by producing seasons of wind and drought of flood and fire (Genesis 4: 17).
Jesus puts mud in the man’s eyes made from his spit from his own DNA reestablishing
the New Creation for all of us through His life. Yes, we are still waiting, and transitions are
painful and difficult, but healing is in the wind.
Jesus made mud for our eyes.
Redemption is here through His Cross and Resurrection. While we wait and hope through transition, we are
discovering that thru them, He is with us. Emmanuel is always with us (Matt. 28: 20).
We discover what it means to trust, to hope to endure and to be victorious by standing with Jesus in the New Creation by welcoming and inviting Him to bring that new DNA of glory andgrace in the Holy Spirit into our transitions.
Come Lord Jesus!
