From the General Presbyter

The world seems to move at a faster pace every year. Maybe you remember when you were a child how the summer spread out before you with endless possibilities and every day was an adventure. Now it sometimes seems like a week is over in what feels like two days. We are nearing the end of another year and sometimes it seems like we just started it. Time is a strange thing and when we fail to live in the present, it goes very quickly. When we were younger, the most important thing was whatever we were doing at the moment. As we get older, the most important thing often seems to be in the future, so time slips away.

Advent is an opportunity to slow down and notice what God is doing in the here and now while also remembering that we await the coming of God’s new creation. Advent is an invitation to see that God is present with us in the joy, the pain, the difficulties, and the opportunities in our lives and in the world. God has broken in on our desire to go our own way and God invites us to follow the way of grace and peace.

Unfortunately, Advent coincides with the biggest cultural attempt to draw us away from God and toward commercialism and consumption. When we get caught up in the ways of the culture, we lose the opportunity to slow down and notice because we are too busy shopping, entertaining, and decorating to take time to remember the immensity of the change that God brought into the world with the birth of Jesus. I invite you to take some time during Advent to notice all the ways that God is at work and to remember the love and grace that changes the world.

The presbytery office will be closed from December 20 to January 3 to give the staff a much-needed break. Our plan is to move the office on January 20 to First Presbyterian, Port Charlotte. We hope the move will be seamless but know that there may be a few glitches. You can always reach us by email or can call my cell phone. We will also be introducing our new website in the next couple of weeks. It is a work in progress, so some links will not be fully populated but our current site will no longer work at the end of the year. We hope you will find the new site to be much better to use and navigate.

Advent blessings,
Melana