Why Advent Matters: Finding God in Grief, Reflection, and Hope with Pastor Jason Jackson

Advent begins in a dark season, especially in the Western Hemisphere, and that’s no accident. 

In this conversation with Pastor Jason Jackson, we explore why Advent matters, especially in seasons marked by grief, disappointment, or exhaustion. We talk about the church calendar, the subversive invitation to slow down, and how this sacred season holds space for both lament and hope. Whether you’re new to Advent or longing to find God in the tension, this episode offers gentle wisdom, theological depth, and a deeply pastoral word for your soul.

Learn more about Communion of the Saints Church in Colorado Springs: https://www.cosdowntown.org/

https://www.simplywholehearted.com/wholeheartedcoachingcollective

Get Your Enneagram Gift Guide and Advent Podcast Playlist https://www.simplywholehearted.com/enneagram-gift-guide

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Plans, parties, and presents. These days always seem to blow together, don't they? But what is Christmas and Advent season really all about? Well, for you, the multi-passionate woman who's seeking purpose, Advent is an invitation to take a sacred past, to refocus on God, on you, and on your people. Welcome to the 9th annual Wholehearted Advent Podcast Series, sharing wisdom and transformation for the moments that matter most. There's so many things I wanted to ask you about. This is a loaded month. There's so much emotion and swirl out there. But I want to invite people to this attention and go, it's okay that this feels hard, that it's not like how it felt when you were a kid, and everything's shiny and wonderful and anticipatory. And it's also okay if you think about when you were a kid how it wasn't, and you missed out on something that you feel like other people have. So we can go through all of that. But I'm just excited to have you come in as a pastor and just pastor us. And I think that's a gifting you instead of have that. You hold that. I've watched deals of that out oftentimes from afar online or through the podcast, because I do have a local church that I'm involved in. But I hear the care, I hear how you make room for those nuances and those tough, harder spaces. So that's what I'd love to do in this. And so maybe you could share a little bit more, too, from a personal standpoint. How do you come into this season? And what does it look like to ready your heart and mind? Because it's so full for a pastor. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Yeah, it's interesting because for I think for a lot of pastors, it is an extremely sort of full season. I think for us at New Life Downtown, because we've been thinking about Advent, observing Advent, one of our practices is we actually simplify more during this season. And when we get into November, December, November still has finished up all the budgets and calendaring and all of those things, annual reviews. We're in the middle of all that right now. But by the time we get to December, we're downshifting in a lot of ways, which has been helpful. So December never feels as busy for us. It probably feels different for, I should be really careful because I think it feels different for our worship team than it feels some of the rest of us, right? They're ramping up with special music and thinking about some of the like creative pieces that we include in worship. That takes more from them and maybe a little bit less from some of the rest of us. So there's always that tension sometimes in a church staff where we we talk about this in the summer too, of so some of the downshifting. But our family ministry team is kids camp and student camp and desperation conference. I mean, they're that's right at full speed, and the rest of us are like, oh, it's vacation. And so for me coming into December, there's a little bit of downshifting, but I know that's not true for everybody on our team, but we do try to simplify that a little bit to make to make some room, and then to hopefully create that for the congregation as well. But for me, I think there's on a personal level, there's so much help in that for me. I think even coming in, I didn't grow up as a follower of Jesus. I came in high school and I wasn't really familiar with the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of the season. I knew Christmas and Easter. So I've had some like we practiced those things in our family. And I knew that Lent meant we had to have fish sticks every day in the cafeteria. And I mean, I knew that I knew that, but nothing more beyond it. And then for the last 25 or so years, since getting introduced into the calendar and the rhythms and the seasons, it has become more and more meaningful over the course of time as a way to really experience the presence of Jesus. And I think that's been the biggest thing is that the calendar in each of its seasons were really, they were designed, they were created, they were meant to help us use that Eugene Peterson language, keep company with Jesus. And if it's outside of that space, then they're not really helpful anymore. They just become things that we're doing. And so, Advent, I think, in particular, coming out of that long season of ordinary time and moving back into maybe some of the more high seasons of the church here, has been particularly meaningful to say, oh, okay, here we go, coming into this season, we're beginning the calendar again, and we're thinking ahead into the next year, but we're doing so as a way of also marking time with the life of Jesus. And I think that's where Advent maybe has been so preparatory for me coming into the this season, to the holidays. The invitation for Advent for me has always been to slow down, to reflect, to take stock, if you will, of the state of my soul. And that just runs so contrary to the rest of the hustle of the holidays. But it's been that that invitation that has been so life-giving for me. But it is it's so incredibly subversive because it is the opposite of everything that's happening around us. But I find it to be been very similar for me, like Sabbath keeping, that Sabbath keeping has this subversive sense in our overfunctioning, nonstop work culture to stop and to rest and to delight and to celebrate and to do all those things. It's so subversive. And in the same way, Advent is as well. Like the holidays are going and they're booming. We got to do this, we gotta do this, we gotta prep this, we gotta go here, we gotta go do that, we gotta ready for this family, we gotta travel here, we gotta get these tickets, these gifts, and stuff. Yeah, and then Advent says, Oh, wait, let's flow and let's reflect and let's pause and let's remember and let's fast, let's abstain. And it has been so life-giving because all of those things then become places, practices in which I can connect with Jesus in the midst of a holiday season that I'm supposed to be all prepping for the celebration of Him, and yet then we are so busy we don't have time to rest in God's presence. So, Advent has been that for me personally, and then as a congregation, that's how we've thought about it as well. So, how do we as a community in the midst of all that's happening, help one another to enter into the season of Advent and not just the holiday season? Yeah, to think specifically what is this and what is the what's the invitation from the spirit in this moment to keep company with Jesus and with one another and with the church global and historic and not just with the culture around us.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Yeah. Okay. It's been, I don't know, that I get really excited about it because of that, even though there's a sobriety about the season.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Right, right. There is. Yeah, you said so many things here that are great. For one, you use the term fasting. We're gonna talk about that in a minute, I'm sure, because suddenly I'm like, okay, so maybe the 12 days of Christmas cookie exchanges probably needs to go. I'm just kidding, I don't do that. But okay, so you hinted that you didn't grow up in the faith necessarily observing anything remotely like the church calendar. So can you give us some of the history behind it? Can you help us nerd out a little bit? Because I think a lot of people don't know it. And it's a very valuable aspect that I personally, again, didn't grow up with it either, but it has become a way of doing that.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Yeah, it really has been. See, for me, it's I just I find it to be so life-giving for me. It's interesting that the history of the calendar is one of those many things, like in Christian history and tradition, that's like open to so much debate and so much speculation and even like some controversies sometimes of how people think about it and feel about it, or they'll just associate it with a specific traditions, like that's Catholic or that's Orthodox, and therefore not for all of us. Like, no, like this is our family, this is our these are our family traditions. And maybe branches of the family have practiced it differently over the time, but maybe there's some things that we can learn from the extended family and embrace in ways that can be true to even how we practice in our own homes and our own congregations. But it's a really yeah, it's a fascinating conversation because you know, on one hand, you have Jesus and his first disciples and the early and the early Christians, they're all Jewish. And from what we can see in the New Testament, they're all still following the Jewish calendar, set out Leviticus 23 and other places. So they're observing Sabbath and they're the feasts of tabernacles and Passover, and these are the things that Jesus and his disciples are engaging in. They're going to the synagogue, they're going to temple. So they're practicing those things. And that calendar itself is significant, it's meaningful, it's beautiful. It's all shaped around the Exodus event, is the really the center point for the Jewish calendar. And what we see happen, I think, especially as we come to the end of the first century, you get the destruction of the temple, you get the growing tension between Christians and Jews, especially with a lot of that was just the spread of Christianity amongst Gentiles. So Jews and Gentiles who are followers of Jesus were trying to figure out how do we do this together. They're under a significant amount of persecution. That's creating some tension between Jews and Christians. And so you have all of those things happening in the background. And I think what happens is that over time, as they're navigating all of those issues, they begin to think about a new calendar that is primarily shaped around Jesus. And that seems to have sort of its incubation period in thinking about Sundays. That you had the first persons are probably, especially those who are Jewish Christians, still maybe going to synagogue or temple on Saturday and then gathering together with the full set of believers, including Gentiles, on Sunday. And over the course of time, Sunday becomes the more prominent place because this is the gathering of the church, as opposed to the continuation of Christians inside of synagogues and those things. And at that point, it becomes Sunday is a celebration of resurrection. Every Sunday is a mini Easter. The Sunday is the day that Jesus was raised from the dead. And so you begin to see Sundays taking on more and more significance. And then because of that, you get Easter starting to take on more significance, certainly still in connection with Passover and the East and the West to think about those things a little bit differently as we have different dates for the Eastern, the Western Church versus the Eastern Church. And then you have subtle developments for the next little bit. But Christmas or the feast of the nativity doesn't become really formalized probably until the fourth century.

SPEAKER_05 11:58

Really?

SPEAKER_02 11:59

So yeah, before it becomes maybe codified in some way, it's this part of the conversation, but before it becomes a formal, maybe celebration or formal feast within the church, we get hints of that in the fourth century. And then it's probably the next century that advent begins to emerge. So probably this century is when we see some of those earliest references. And it seems to develop similar to the way that Lent did. That as Easter is taking on significance, then there became this impulse. We need to prepare our hearts for this. We need to prepare for Easter and the celebration and the season of feasting. And so you begin to have the establishment of a season of fasting, of preparation, of examining our hearts and our lives coming into the Easter season. We begin to see the same thing develop with Advent of As we come toward Christmas, how are we going to prepare? It just then took a while. Then becomes more widely observed, then begins all the traditions begin to develop from there. But over time, it emerged as clearly as a season of preparation for Christmas. So not another name for Christmas.

unknown 13:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

Which is the way that sometimes so many people in our culture talk about it. Especially I we can't look anywhere anymore without advent calendars. Right, right. With chocolates at Trader's. With chocolates and trader. Yeah. It's a fascinating thing to see them more and more on Amazon and Target and other places. Right. So began as this reflective preparation for Christmas as the second longest fast in the calendar.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

No way. I don't think I realized that. Compared to Lent.

SPEAKER_02 13:49

Compared to Lent. So it's after it's shorter than Lent, but it's still an extended fast if you think about four Sundays, uh, plus whatever days between that Sunday and it varies in in length as opposed to Lent is always the same length. Advent varies a little bit. But then the other place of significance that it took on is which we don't, I don't think it's talked about very often in some of the conversations around Advent, is that it's our new year. The Christian calendar begins with the first Sunday of Advent.

SPEAKER_05 14:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

So we're celebrating kind of our new year in late November, early December. Uh, and this is actually one of the things that I find to be most helpful about the season is it's so unlike every other New Year celebration. Yes, exactly. It's not dancing, it's not fireworks, it's not late night parties, but it's somber, as we said earlier.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

It's um and it's not indulgent.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

It's not indulgent, it's not over the top. Um, I was I was thinking about as I was preparing for this, it reminds me a lot that of just the story of creation that we begin our year the way that the world began. We begin in darkness waiting for the dawn. Wow, we begin in silent expectation, waiting for the word to come. We we begin in quiet and reflection and repentance. Have you been thinking about all the ways we've contributed to the chaos and disorder of the world? And longing for Jesus to come, longing for him to come to rescue and to restore all things. So it's taken on that significance in those three ways preparing for Christmas, but preparing in a very unique way, not by celebrating early, but by really examining our hearts. And as a really unique kind of beginning to a new year. And I don't think that means that we necessarily have to say no to every aspect of Christmas Creek that comes in, or that we can't celebrate New Year on December 31st. It just we just have to remember at the end of the day, we're following Jesus. And so how do we think first about what does it mean to follow Jesus and his life during this time? And then we have all the other things that we're dealing with as well. But Advent helps us just prioritize that relationship with Jesus and those those things that we don't often do during the year. If we only are fasting at Lent, then okay, we don't have another fasting season in our calendar. We have the normal fast rhythms of the church, but really just becomes one fast if we ignore that part of Advent.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah. Oh man, there's so much good here. Thank you for giving us some details. I'm learning some new things here. I love it. No, I'm here for it for sure, for sure. And my friends are too. I think what's really interesting, and you had alluded to this before of orienting how the rhythms of work have shifted in order to make the month these holiday season, the avenue season a little less full. I think it was three years ago, maybe it was two years ago that I shifted as well. Maybe this is the third year that I shifted my work rhythms that way too. I did, and I it was unintentionally aligning with this Christian maybe practice, if you will, but I just had fell in my spirit where part of sometimes part of the end of the year is still loaded because it's all the pressure of finishing things, because you've set a certain expectation around time, but then the emotion of the holidays in connection with finishing those things. And then you compound it with reflection, which can in itself reloaded and disappointed. And so I started shifting my new year to November and just practicing it that where what January used to be empty. That subtle shift has done a lot in healing my heart and or continuing the healing. And I think it's a silly little thing and people might want their new year to be July. It doesn't matter. But I think for me, it's created space that has aligned better with what I want my intention to be. Instead of feeling like the end of the year, like if you own a business, you want to hit those quarter four goals. Well, you have all that pressure in the midst of all these other emotions and what should be or what could be. And it just was setting me up for disaster. So I love hearing that, like maybe there's a principle to it. And that even I don't think I understood that avant was the beginning of the year, new year in that sense. And that I'm like, okay, makes so much sense. And you know, the little mind-blowing emoji, yes, okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Well, yeah, I mean, as you were saying that it made me just even think of truthfully, we have lots of new years, yes, right, that are naturally built into our lives. So sure, January is like the new year in terms of our Gregorian calendar sort of things, but August really feels like the new year for a lot of families. It's like the new school year, and then businesses have different fiscal years, right? And so, like you said, for some it's June or July is the beginning of the new year. Um, but advent marks the beginning of a new year in our life with Jesus, and so it may it doesn't negate that those other things exist for us, it just says, okay, if we're in my life with Jesus, what where what am I starting off in? Where do I feel his invitation? Where is his presence? And how do I create this space to reflectively think about the year that has passed and the year that's ahead and where Jesus is inviting me to be with him? And if it's really hard to do that in some of those other new year seasons of that.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Yeah, because it's you're using like a reset, right? But how can you reset in the middle of a hurried pace and so much decadence or indulgence where it's hardly reset? There's no space there. It's crowded, it's full, including our stomachs.

SPEAKER_02 20:22

Yes, our stomachs are full. And then if you've taken vacation time at around Christmas, then you're coming back and it's oh, we've been out of work for a week, and there's so much we gotta get caught up on all the emails, we gotta do this, we gotta do that, we gotta plan for this next year and in church world, we gotta launch small goose, we gotta launch this, we gotta launch that. And so advent has been such a gift to say, oh no, this is the start of the new year. And I'm beginning and thinking about okay, what is what does Jesus have? What is Jesus setting before us? And to have those conversations even before we get into the parties and celebrations and those those things, or to at least the invitation to create space for all of that.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah. Well, Christmas tide. So and the 12 days of Christmas and all of that. Yes. Okay. It's so much good here. And there's a lot more that we could talk about and dive into that I'd love to touch on this because I feel like you can master some hearts here. But and that is just the reality that the holiday season brings up a lot of difficult feelings. And then there might be loneliness if you do not have the friends or community or family situation that you desire. Maybe there's grief because of loss or because things didn't turn out how you thought this year. So what encouragement might you offer? I know this is such an easy task, right? But for those of us who are struggling to find some joy and peace.

SPEAKER_02 21:49

Yeah. It does. It's it's still unbelievably difficult. You know, it's the holidays, unfortunately, for all of their goodness and beauty and wonder and frivolity. Those things they just tend to highlight all of our heartache as well. And you touched on a number of them. If you think you've lost a loved one this last year, okay, this is the first time that we're sitting down at this table for Christmas Eve, and that person's not with us. Or maybe you've gotten one of those like devastating diagnoses, and this is the last time that we're then we might all be able to sit down together. Or I just remember as a as a kid, even this is really kind of as I was just beginning to follow Jesus, and that all came on the heels of my parents' separation and divorce. And that just you know upends everything. Yeah, like this is how we used to do it, but we are never gonna do it that way again. And then you add in people that are feeling estranged, maybe as kids estranged for parents, or parents estranged for kids, or whatever that happens to be, or friendships that have gone wonky. And then financial hardship. I mean, that's something too that if you're like wanting to provide a particular kind of experience, and then just find we don't have the resources to do this. You know, it's just it can be so much that becomes like the shadow over the entire time that fills what has maybe felt like joy, it just fills it, fills it with grief from there. I think this is one of the reasons why I think advent is so important because advent specifically invites us or encourages us to like name all of those things to name our struggles, to name our longings. It's the only season in the church calendar that is focused on the Old Testament. The church calendar is primarily following the life of Jesus.

unknown 23:55

Right.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

So Advent is this period where we re- we re-enter the story in the life of Israel. And if you think about Israel's life with God, it was constantly marked by the very things that our lives are often marked with grief, anxiety, doubt, disappointment, anger, guilt, fear, conflict, all of those 10 things are present. But interesting, like in their like world, in their culture, they just they like really, I think maybe more freely than we do, gave voice to all of those things and made space for those things. Or we try to hide them, you know, and pretend, or if we don't feel like we can hide them, then we hide ourselves.

SPEAKER_05 24:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

So if we feel like, oh, I can compose myself and I can hide, I can keep my emotions chucked away, then you know, then I can go out of the house. And if I can't, I just better stay in. But we find this all over the Old Testament, the Psalms, maybe most in particular, where depending upon how you count and categorize the Psalms, half of them are lament psalms. Right. Half of them are people voicing their complaints, their anger, their fear, their struggles. It's here we find that they're almost like irreverent rants become holy scripture.

SPEAKER_03 25:14

It's true.

SPEAKER_02 25:15

You agree, you're like, can you say that?

SPEAKER_03 25:18

Can I pray that?

SPEAKER_02 25:20

I don't think that that's okay. But their whole life with God is in many ways a struggle. It's one of the ways that people understand the word Israel is to strive or contend or to struggle with God. So Advent invites us to join them in that struggle, to join them in that wrestle. So it does again become another kind of way of subverting the rest of the culture around us that doesn't want to make space for those things. And so I think Advent encourages us to not like shy away from those things, but to fully lean into them. So to let ourselves grieve again, to let ourselves feel all of those feelings, but to grieve as Christians do, as those with hope, knowing that the tears that we have are not eternal, that someday Christ is going to come again and he's gonna wipe those from our eyes. But right now, the tears are still there and reminds us of that. The root word adventist means coming or arrival. And so we live our whole lives between Jesus' first coming and his second coming in the already and the not yet. So, yes, we have access to the presence of Jesus in new ways, and the spirit is with us, and we can experience joy. And yes, all of those things are true. And yes, also true that not everything's right, not everything's good, not everything's beautiful, not everything is the way that we want it to be, much less the way not everything is the way that God wants it to be. And so God invites us to kind of come into those spaces. But it's really hard if we're not talking about it in that way, and if we're not creating spaces for each other to do that. But earlier this year we had several deaths in our congregation, um, kind of all stacked on top of one another and very like it was a really, really difficult season. And during that time, I came across this Mary Oliver poem where she says, we shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time these two have, housed as they are in the same body. And so that's true of our experience as people, but it's also experience of the body of Christ. On any given Sunday, people are shaking with joy. They've had, they just had a baby, they just got married, they just got engaged, they just got a promotion, they just got a new job, they just had a race, what they're like, yes, they're coming in ready to praise God. And there's people that just had a terrible doctor's visit or just lost the job or just had a miscarriage, or just and all of that is coming in. And that's heightened in the holidays. Some people are getting urine bonuses, some people can't buy their kids presents, and those things are coming into the room. And so I think as a king as communities of faith, we have to try to make space for those things. And Advent gives us a little bit of extra permission, if you will, to lean into the egg, to lean into the struggle. So I think if that's you, you've had coming into holidays, and it's just so unbelievably difficult. I think the encouragement would be to like let it out.

unknown 28:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:31

Like lament, cry, complain, scream, you know, but also try in whatever way you can to lean into community.

SPEAKER_05 28:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

By nature, suffering is isolating. And the temp the temptation is to withdraw even further. Not and then you have the holidays, which is turning up the volume on our pain. And so the tendency is just going to be to withdraw. I'm not going to go to church, I'm not going to go to small group, I'm not going to go talk to my friend, but instead lean in. But I think also as the church, we if we, if if we find ourselves in places like we're experiencing all the joy and those kinds of things, we have to remember those in the midst who are not experiencing them. Make space for that in whatever way that we can. We did, we just had last Saturday our All Saints Day service. It's another one of those moments in the church calendar where we just stop and it precedes all the holidays, November 1st or the Sunday closest to November. And we read aloud the names of everybody who's passed, who's been a part of our congregation over our 12-year history. And we lit a candle in remembrance of them. And if family members or friends were there, then they came and gave them remembrances and lit those candles and space for tears. And as some people do like blue Christmas services. Even sometimes in our candlelighting things, we can recognize that yes, there is hope, and yes, there is peace, and yes, there is love, and yes, there is joy. There is those things, we have them in Jesus, but we don't have them in full. And that means we're still waiting for those things. We're still waiting for Jesus to come back. And as long as we are waiting for him, we're going to experience trouble, we're going to experience heartache, we're going to experience loss, we're going to experience really difficult things and hope and love, enjoy, and peace. These are also going to be elusive as much as they are re as much as they are real. And so, whatever we can do to help hold that tension for one another and create in that kind of space, I think it is would be it's really helpful as the body of Christ to do that together.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

That is so rich. Thank you for speaking into that. And I one of the things that pops into my mind is the the verse that has been on my mind. And even something I posted at one point was just Romans 12.8, rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn. Very good time for us to practice that. I think all the time and every day, but how much more we could offer that in the body of Christ during this adventities anywhere. And it's wonderful. And there's no dream if you can celebrate wholeheartedly without the sharp being a lot. That is wonderful. It doesn't negate your joy, the fact that others have lost and grief. But but I think as we mature in Christ, we can have the strength to hold that for others and be able to know. And as far as Christ said, as we get older, it only goes more like that.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

And even the counter itself around rhythms for that.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

Yes. Of Advent and Lent invite us into those spaces of pain and sorrow. We don't live our whole lives there either. You know, so maybe if we're in a space where our whole lives just are feeling like up and to the right, Advent and Lent can be places where we stop and remember the global and historic church and know that not everybody's lives are up and to the right. And ours probably won't always be either. And even if it feels up and to the right, there may be things underneath the surface that we're not paying attention to that are not necessarily that way. But then also when we find ourselves in places where everything is just seems like it's coming to part of the seams.

SPEAKER_05 32:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Then the Christmas season and the Easter season invite us in our grief and our despair and our pain and suffering to also hold on to gratitude and hope and celebration and feasting and and to allow those things even to be like a prophetic act of resistance. I did this last summer. I did like a series for our small groups on play, which I'm not naturally good at, but one of the things that I try to remember if it was Brugemann or if it was who it was, but somebody just they described play that way as a prophetic act of resistance against the powers that be. Oh, it's Bonhoeffer said something along the lines of in the his writing in the midst of World War II. Who in the midst of all of this could possibly play, could possibly give themselves over to this? And his conclusion is only the Christian who says, I have hope beyond all of this, I have joy beyond all of this, I have peace and love in my future, and I'm hoping in those things. And so we we have spaces, I think, to do both, and we need the rhythm of both so that in order in ordinary time, that's right. We learn to hold them all together. And in our relationships, we learn to hold them together.

SPEAKER_04 33:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

Well, and I have found in my own, and I'm sure you would testify to this, that when we give the space to mourn, to grieve, to lament in advent, the celebration is all the more sweeter in in all the senses and even in the depths of our soul, where we're able to, I don't know, the joy just seems so much brighter and bigger. And it doesn't mean that it negates the sorrow and the pain, but somehow it supersedes it, the steam and is a bomb in itself.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

Even like physiologically, sometimes once we cry a whole ton, sometimes our bodies start to laugh.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Right.

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Like that's allowed. And then all of a sudden we're like, I can't believe I did that. And we start chuckling. You're like, what is happening? Right. But it does. Grief can open us up to joy.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah. I've had clients who have said, I'm afraid to start crying because I don't know that I'll stop. And then I can testify there is a point. You just, you eventually stop. And and when you allow yourself, physiologically we've been created to where they're coming to an end that they do just drive. And and you can get to that though. I think if you're like, oh, if I if that feeling of if I start crying, I may not stop. I understand there's a time and a place don't do when you're driving. Maybe now it's exactly there's a story. I just looked at the time and my heart was like, okay, still it's okay. I don't know what to add this of everyone, but if you could do first maybe anything else that you'd love to share with us just before we finish, but then if you would pray for us. And not everyone does that, and it's not always just that I feel like this is so fitting and appropriate, and it would bless those who listen. So your words of wisdom as we finish.

SPEAKER_02 35:40

Yeah, I think whatever I'm always really sensitive whenever I talk about anything in the church calendar is that it can just feel like another thing. Yeah, sure. Well, now I'm supposed to do this too on top of everything, on the top of everyone else. So if you're like new to this stuff, like just be like really kind, really gentle, really patient with yourself. All the every practice that we're invited into is followers of Jesus, we learn really slowly over time.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Right.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

100%. And we make a lot of mess of it most of the time. And then we say, Oh, we think we got a rhythm, and then we make a mess of it again, and it's okay. So true. It's just part of it. And so just think really if you're wondering where to get started, maybe maybe it's as simple as rearranging something. And we started to move more things from December into the 12 days of Christmas time period. And it's like, we're we'll do that then. So we just rearrange a little bit so we don't add something new, we just move it. That that creates space sometimes for people, just maybe you've got a normal rhythm with Jesus, just maybe incorporate one little thing into that time. So if you're reading the scriptures regularly, just read some lament songs, just incorporate that in. And it doesn't always have to be adding a ton of a ton of new things or just adding an advent wreath and doing that one night a week in in your home with your roommates or whatever that happens to be. There's a lot of ways to create space from there, but just be gentle and remember that the whole point of the thing is to be with Jesus and not just to do another thing, not just to say, Oh yeah, I do Advent. That's great. But if observing Advent doesn't lead you deeper into the presence of Jesus, then stop.

unknown 37:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02 37:31

It's not worth it at that point in time. So, but yeah, thanks for the invitation to praise Jesus. We enter into this season, a season of preparation of our hearts to once again receive your first coming and to live with anticipation of your second. As we find ways to slow down, to be with you, as we receive your invitation of the season of advent. And as we walk into holiday time that may be filled with profound joy, or may be filled with just devastating grief and loss. I ask for all of us that we would encounter your presence, that you would be with us. The whole season is preparing us for Emmanuel, God with us. And you are with us not in only not in just certain moments of our lives, but you are with us in every moment. So in every moment of celebration, may we be aware of your nearness, your withness, and every moment of pain, of sorrow, of loss, of grief, of disorientation, disappointment, fear and anxiety, whatever other difficult things that we're experiencing, estrangement and loss, may we be reminded that you're the God who came near to us, who's still near, and will be with us always until the end of the age. Make your presence known among us. In Jesus' name. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

Amen. Jason, thank you so much. Thank you for leading with integrity and goodness and just doing an excellent job and giving this precious time, even on a snow day. Oh, and conversation.

SPEAKER_02 39:39

Yeah, thank you. It was an absolute gift. So grateful for you and for all the spaces you're creating for people and all the conversations that you're hosting, and that you're a great gift to so many people. So thanks for the honor to join you and your whole group of people in these conversations. Bless you and your family.

SPEAKER_01 40:03

As you go, friend, may you slow down, savor the moments that matter most, and make space for Christ to meet you right where you are. And if you need a little more support this season, you can download the free wholehearted gift-giving guide or book a clarity call to help you find peace and presence in your own story. Merry Christmas. And remember, your wholehearted story is still being written.