Searchers - Advent 1 - Disorganising and re-organising

With quizzes, video clips and father and son duo, we laughed our way through today’s session!

Lindy read from Luke 1:5-25 about Zachariah and his vision. As he did not believe the message, he became mute, giving him time to ponder and process what he’d been told. He and his elderly wife would have a son!

Do we have a lot of silence in our lives / Can we be silent?

Most of us felt that we have too much noise in our lives that can block out God. For some of us, silence and being on our own, is great for prayer and listening to God’s responses. Others said they can’t bear silence and feel that God speaks to them through the words of others.

Can we link silence and Advent?

Perhaps through the ideas of waiting, expectancy and hope.

Events in the Bible which have a ‘disorganising narrative’ have become our bedtime stories! Throughout the Bible we read about disorganising and re-organising of situations. Zechariah’s life was put on hold. It teaches us to see the new starts in the inconvenient stops and that hope comes out of disorganisation as we can organise something new.

Our lives experience ‘disorganisation’ at times, as if a jigsaw has been thrown up in the air and lands in a strange way. Think of what we have experienced with Covid this year – it’s disorganised us - but out of it new ways of organising have appeared, for example, how we have met together with more people over Zoom.

Claire read a prayer from the service of Compline, as, during Advent, it seems appropriate to pray into the night and darkness.... “It is night – we rest in you....”

We were encouraged to do an ‘apprentice piece’ to share next week:

1 Think of when your life has been unsettled.

2 Think of an area in your life that you wish some unsettlement would take place!

3 Learn how to sign “unsettled” in British Sign Language.

4 Draw a picture or write a poem entitled “Unsettled Christmas.“