When I look at the Advent season I think of how much I long for peace, hope, love and joy.  I desire a future where I can feel God’s love and be surrounded by people who unite together to make a better world and support one another.  I look at the beauty of a newborn child the innocence, the awe, the wonder.  A future yet to unfold.  

I am not always sure how to bring light into the circumstances of my life.  One of my biggest challenges is dealing with the fears that grip me.  This past year alone was filled with many situations that felt beyond my control.  A loved one dying from alcoholism, financial insecurities, people I care about in jail, ongoing pain, political upheaval, and all the struggles of Covid. I feel the fear of greater loss, of lives on the edge, of health becoming worse, of sobriety threatened, of relationships becoming strained and a world with much evil.  I fear my own sanity and ability to cope as I feel the rawness and confusion when the path ahead is not always clear.  

I am so grateful for what I can see, for where the Spirit is at work in my inner life.  Not every circumstance has gotten better, but I see myself growing and reaching out in ways I haven’t before.  With the isolation, I am learning to call friends more often to catch up and really talk about life.  I am pausing more to listen to the wisdom of others.  I am more intentional when I walk in nature about taking in the beauty, and spending more time with my Higher Power.  I am much kinder to myself (and others), being aware of the negative messages I say to myself, and watching them pass through with grace.  I am grieving more my losses and resentments and looking at the real pain that radiates in my soul.  

Often I see the grace of God in the middle of my fears.  This past year I started a God box where i try to surrender my concerns to my God.  The funny thing is a friend in recovery suggested this about 10 years ago, but I never found it necessary.  In some ways, it was my way of being open to Hope again.  Maybe, just maybe, the Spirit would move through my life in new ways.  Though many of the things in my God box keep coming back for me to surrender, the act of doing so has made me more aware of my Higher Power at work.

My prayer box was a key thing that drew me to Montavilla United Methodist Church.  The fact that I saw the job announcement itself was pretty ironic, as the particular job was outside of the location of my job search but somehow the search engine included it.  When I read the description of the job, it was a lot of what I had put in my God box for a future position – where I would better utilize my gifts and passions.  When I had the Zoom interview (in my sweats with my 2 cats :)), it was amazing.  I loved the people, they made me laugh, I loved their passion and the church’s mission, and I felt like God was leading me this way.  Since you are reading the post, you can see I got the job.  

What surprised me the most about this job, is my fears intensified.  I really thought that being in what I saw as God’s will, and working for a church would relieve me of my fears.  The reality though is my fears can be pretty deep, and like many of us I have wounds that are associated with the church and with the humans in the church.  So I will continue to do what I know – look for the light, pray to receive the love, and allow my God to work in and through me.  In spite of my fears, in spite of my insecurities, I put my Hope in a God who brings beauty in all sorts of places.  

In the middle of all of life, I believe in the light of the Star, of Jesus, of the Spirit to bring hope.  I sit in this presence with my fears and concerns, to bring me comfort and love.  To create some space in my brain for my God to speak to me, to look for a way through it.  I can’t control my fear and anxiety anymore than I can control other people, but I can speak truth in the lies that try to suffocate me, and tell me this is the end of the story.  I can sit in the grief, the questions and know I don’t have to be strong, I don’t have to figure it all out, I just need to receive and give love, to do the next thing.  To be willing to step out into the unknown and my fears, to find where my God is at work.  My fears are just fears.  Yet my God is still God.  

In Grace and Love,

Elissa Noble

Office Manager