When I was a little boy I got into trouble for writing on my bedroom wall. The writing was a record of the time I awoke each morning; I learned to tell the time at a younger age than all my peers thus buying myself the chance to read during ‘telling the time’ lessons at school. The record for which I endured maternal wrath was a story of early hours, frequently starting with a 4, usually a 5 and occasionally a 6.
I have not changed in the habit save that I no longer write on the bedroom wall. There are morning people and there are evening people; our body clocks work differently. Morning is about starting, about getting on with the day, about launching into life.
The season of Advent is about preparation for a very special morning, it is about the new liturgical year and it is about new beginnings, new hopes and, this year especially, a new yearning for light in the darkness.
There is a hymn which I love, which only appears in The Baptist Hymnbook, Baptist Praise and Worship and Congregational Praise, though it may well be elsewhere in Welsh. I learned it from the latter book where it is prefaced (no. 342) with the phrase, ‘They that watch for the morning’.
As the season for excitement amongst small children (and not so young larger people) approaches, a growing number of us will watch for the morning in anticipation of happy times in family or friendship groups and, inevitably, in anticipation of the kindness of others. As advent draws on, people of goodwill grow more aware of the needs and emptiness of all who awake on December 25th with nothing much to look forward to or possibly even fearing an even lonelier day than usual.
The past months have seen a tidal wave of changed habits crashing through our lives. In the clear up, though the storm roars on, we are seeing changed dynamics in the way we ‘do church’ and, for me, more significantly, people who have found their way to God for the first time or back to him after long years of overlooking, avoiding or simply abandoning the great blessing of eternal love in their lives.
The first four lines of the first verse of the hymn reads:
“The light of the morning is breaking,
The shadows are passing away,
The nations of earth are awaking,
New peoples are learning to pray.”
Yes it was originally included in Congregational Praise as a Missionary Hymn but now its theme is apposite everywhere. Perhaps that is why the old fashioned section in the hymnbook was called ‘Home and foreign missions’.
Mission is outreach, witnessing, sharing Gospel.
A prayer
Loving God, as we prepare our hearts and minds for Christmas, let us pray that we may refocus on praying to reconnect us more securely with you and your morning. Help us see through the shadows and into the brightness you have offered the world in Jesus Christ, a light in the darkness of loneliness, deprivation and poverty, sin and shame, oh, and COVID.
May we learn to pray, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.