Connections. . .

First Sunday of Advent
"'Be watchful!  Be alert!  You do not know when the time will come.."       Mark 13:33-37

The waiting room
The waiting room of a hospital's intensive care unit is unlike any place in the world.  And the people who wait there are bound together like no others anywhere.
     Family members and friends can't do enough for each other.  No one is proud, no one stands on ceremony or protocol.  Petty disputes and hurts are no where to be found.  The distinctions of race and class melt away.  A person is a father or spouse first; white, black, Asian second.  The garbage man loves his wife as much as the university professor loves his--and everyone understands.  Each person pulls for everyone else.  A family's good news gives joy and hope to everyone; the sadness and grief of a family's loss is felt by all.
In the intensive care waiting room, the world changes.  Vanity and pretense vanish.  The entire universe is focused on the doctor's next report.
In the intensive care waiting room, we can't help but face the fact that life is fragile and limited.  In waiting word of some improvement in our loved one's condition, every moment of life becomes a gift.
The intensive care waiting room is a place of hoping.  It is a place of anticipating, of expecting.  It is a place of Advent.
[Adapted from One Church from the Fence by Wes Seelinger.]

CONNECTION:  Life is a waiting room, a place confronting us with both the preciousness and precariousness of the time we are given and the inevitable, though still always difficult, changes that we must contend with in the course of that time.  Our lives are an Advent, a time of anticipating, expecting, hoping.  Being an "Advent" people is to understand the importance of now -- that now is the time to love our spouses and children, that now is the time for hugs and I-love-you's, that now is the time to make the kind of memories that will live on well after we have left this world.

PLEASE PRAY FOR

Those in our community who are ill:
Bea Kayser, John McAlpine, Irene Mitchell, Clarence Thole, Geraldine Shea,  Mary Ann DeMars, Linda Zappa, Kevin Keenan, Chris Fodness, Elvira Jacobson, LaVonne Hruby, Lois Leary, Walter Slatoski, Jerod
Hawley, Bernadette Hearn. Henry Widmer, Donald Farnsworh, Irene DeBruzzi, Joe Koch, Ann Griffin, Ann Czech, Dan Sebesta, Beverly Stamfle, Lois Alberg, Mary Kay Utecht, Anne Neubauer, Sandra Zauner, Michael Kavanagh, Richard St. Germain, David Moser, Bernard Bentler, Diane Ryan, John Battmer, Bill Miske, Jacquie Evans, LeRoy Zamor, Mary Shea, Henry Horbatuck,
Sr. Lois Wasielewski, James and Frances Vonasek, Marjorie Peterson, Infinity Duncan, Marlene Wresh, Marie Macho, Ruth White, Frank Gajeski, Phyllis Rech, Wanda Swanson, Susan Amos Palmer, Betty Kapala, Marcie Thompson, Bernice VandenPlas

The families and souls of those who recently have died:
Ambrose Waldoch, Donald R. Johnson (husband of Camille)