Spirit of God, who hovered over the chaos of the waters, meet us in the chaos of movement. Meet us on the way. Teach us the lessons of the journey. Give us the courage to face the openness of each moment and pay attention to the movement of the Spirit.
Amen.

It is currently 130 steps from my back door to my compost pile round trip. I say currently because I have a habit of moving my compost bin around. So, currently, it takes a little over ten dozen steps to take out the compost. This seems like a journey of insurmountable distance at 8:00 pm. To plunge into the dark and cold with a paper grocery sack of table scraps seems inconceivable—how could you even ask that of me? Even though it is only six hundredths of a mile, the act of beginning is sometimes more than I can muster.

To tell you the truth, scraping together enough credulity to participate in Advent can feel like an impossible six hundredths of a mile journey. To choose to follow a star you have followed before is to choose a path of stubborn innocence. To imagine the miraculous, to embrace an incarnation, to journey to Bethlehem is to choose the possible over the what has been.

We confess that we have not paid attention to the journey. We confess that we have chosen to distract ourselves rather than see what it is that God is doing around us. We embrace the moment and the journey.

Why do we choose to leave our Jerusalems to go to Bethlehem? Jerusalem, the glorious dwelling place of the holy. O Jerusalem, the richness of your rationality and knowledge! The elegance of your art and society! Why do we abandon you for Bethlehem?

Can you feel the road to Bethlehem? The lonely journey. The Pilgrim's path.

Does the journey whisper to you? Does Advent urge you to lean in? Here in the quiet and darkness of Bethlehem, you can hear the rustling of something beating through time: the wild heartbeat of something to come.

God of the journey, we thank you for the dust from which you called us into being, the dust which coats us as we follow in your footsteps, and the dust that we wash from our feet in joyful remembrance of how our hearts were stirred along the way.

In the name of the Word through whom all was created,
Amen