Advent Reflection 2024 Growing Downwards

Dear God,

What does this mean for us?
You are bread and baker, you are lamb and shepherd,
But you are also child and midwife,
Stranger and friend;
For you come to us, in ways that are both familiar and new,
Disrupting what we take for granted,
Taking root amongst us, like a weed that will not go away,
Making some of our safety feel oddly dangerous
While giving sanctuary to those with nowhere to place their head.
So come again, bring your chaos,
Up-end our securities, destabilise our foundations,
Even as a small event in an overbearing world;
Come, in your smallness, till we see more clearly the scale of the challenge:
The bread that is stone, the shepherds that neglect their sheep,
The children that play tunes but are ignored;
Come, bring your chaos, do your worst,
Like a wind that carries our hopelessness while nourishing hope,
and help us, like Jesus, to fly kites that show your currents
flowing towards a different kind of world
where those on their thrones are brought low
and the little, the least, the last, the lost are fed at your party;
so come, bring your chaos,
till we learn to grow downwards, to see the world from lower down
while flying these bold kites, which dip and dive,
and fall and rise;
come, bring your chaos, that we may bring our own
in pursuit of your desires
on earth as in your dreams.

From God the Child by Graham Adams, pg 96

_{Photo by Gareth Harper on Unsplash}