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What "watch and wait" look like

 The theme of Advent for this first week is “watching and waiting”.  It is an invitation to our souls to enter into the peace of the Lord where our daily anxieties, worries, and even suffering experience God’s ever-merciful grace and peace.

Why is peace so hard to attain?  I believe it is because we miss the eternal sources of peace God has revealed to us, and thus try to attain peace in the energies of our own flesh.

Jesus once when asked by disciples what the signs of his (second) coming would look like, said:    
Luke 21:33-36
  "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.
But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly.
 For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth.
 Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man."

In this we begin to see the means of peace in a troubled world.  “My words”, remind us that it is in Jesus that we discover God’s peace.   When Jesus met with his disciples on the last night before his arrest said these words:

John 14:23-27
Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.  “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you.  But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.  Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid”.

Among other things, we begin to see that to “watch and wait”  means we are in Jesus’ words, in Jesus’ prayer, and in Jesus’ grace – through the Spirit of God. 

Father Jean-Pierre De Caussade wrote a wonderful book entitled “Abandonment to Divine Providence”.  He reminds us that watching and waiting in a proper way will always lead us to Christ’s peace.  “The Holy Scriptures frequently recommend us to ‘wait on the Lord’ and there is hardly any means better calculated to make us holy. There is nothing to which souls already sufficiently exercised in the active life and the fulfillment of the precepts should more earnestly apply themselves, than to these peaceful waitings of Jesus’ words.

On this second day in Advent, we wait, we watch, we live in the expectancy of Christ’s second Advent, even as we look forward – in these days to follow - to celebrating his first Advent.

The world will not change, but we can change our world.

John 16:33
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

May His Peace rest upon you.

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