These four weeks before Christmas Day have been called the season of Advent by the church. It’s a derivative of the Latin word adventus, which means “coming.” It’s a season where we wait and expect what is coming; in this case, Christmas. But in a world of same-day deliveries and instant streaming, we’re not exceptionally accustomed to waiting. We live with fairly instant gratification. What good is it to wait anyway? We live such fast-paced lives, that there’s not time to do the long and tired work of waiting.

But I also think that the pace at which we live is wearing on us. Our anxiety is higher, we don’t take the time to make genuine connection because we don’t have time, and we’re so used to our scrolling through our social media feeds that we’ve learned to take in the world that way. What would it look like to do things differently? To sit down at the table with strangers and friends, or strangers becoming friends, and share our lives. To look someone in the eye and hear their story. To have someone listen to our stories.

This is the work of Front Porch Mountain View. It’s work that we get to engage in each Sunday evening as we gather around the table. It’s the work of reshaping our lives into something different. This is the perfect season for Front Porch, the season of waiting, because we’re looking to reshape the narrative of our lives. We are no longer consumers living on the edge and making sure we consume all that we can as quickly as we can. Instead, we are becoming people who pause, who share, who listen. And so, we enter into this season of waiting knowing that we are carving out for ourselves a new rhythm; something that connects us to something larger than ourselves.

So may it be.

In Community,

Sam