PSF Devo

This is the devotion that I wrote for the weekly email Presbyterian Student Fellowship sends out each Monday. I hope it moves you and causes you to think of the life changing moments you have each day. Blessings!

Sunday night was my first Christmas pageant experience. It was quite an experience: costumes, props, singing, joking, and a for-real videographer. I went with some of my housemates to Second Presbyterian’s “The Backwards Christmas Pageant.” I didn’t understand the title until the play started and the wise people appeared first. Then it dawned on me: backwards means the story is going to go backwards.

As the pageant continued, the story got closer to Jesus. The wise people came and went; the shepherds disappeared before the audience knew where they had fled to (the manager), and the sheep continued to wander through the sanctuary. Near the end of the pageant, Mary and Joseph were talking about what it meant to welcome Jesus into their lives. Joseph was questioning how Mary felt about it all—especially the part with the angel telling her she was to have God’s son, when she simply replied: “There are moments that change everything, and this was one of them.” Later in the pageant, as the gathered characters stood over the manger, adoring the babe, the narrator kept saying: “This will change everything.”

We’ve all had those moments, the moments in our own lives that change everything: the moments of new life, death, moving away from home, trips to distant lands, deep conversations, etc. Beyond those moments, there was a babe born in a manger who changed everything. His life was a million moments that changed everything—from the angel that proclaimed his birth, to the miracles, to a painful death on a cross, to a glorious resurrection. Every moment about his life changed everything we know. All of his moments make our life changing moments mean something much more.

While this Advent season is full of finals and heading home for the holidays, remember that each and every moment you have in your life has the power and the ability to change things, just as all of Christ’s moments have changed everything.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. John 1. 1-4; 12-13