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But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
2 Peter 3:10
Sometimes I experience seasons of loss that have God’s fingerprints all over them. Everything seems to be humming along just fine and then wham! God sneaks in like a thief and pulls the proverbial rug out from under me. The things I was holding onto fly out of my hands and the neatly ordered décor of my daily existence crashes to the ground. The lamps fall, the light bulbs smash and I find myself flailing on a cold floor, bruised and confused with no light to see by.
“I have written to stimulate you to wholesome thinking,” says the author of today’s Epistle. This is hardly what anyone wants to hear when the world is falling around them, but the author reminds his readers, then and now, to “recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets.” The texts of the prophets before and, I would add, the text of all God’s creation around us, remind that destruction is not the end—it is rather the initiation of a new beginning.
God is always making, unmaking and remaking. “By God’s word,” writes the apostle, “the heavens came into being, the earth was formed out of water and by these waters also the world of that time was destroyed.” Just as the moon empties of its light before waxing again, and as winter trees are stripped of leaves before bursting with green in the spring, so God reliably removes my connections, commitments and cares for the sake of speaking a new word into and through my life. The season of Advent, for me, is a willing journey all the way into that darkness and a full embrace of that uncomfortable emptiness, while I await the dawning of God’s new day—however long that day is meant to last.
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