'Time goes more quickly the older you are!'  How often do we hear those sentiments expressed when we admit to one another out of frustration, a sense of resignation or renewed amazement that we do not know where the time goes. However, it seems that even teenagers also have that sense of time running away from them, which can be quite comforting for those of us of an older generation!

So here we are, approaching the last few weeks of the year. We have now arrived at the season of Advent which begins on the first Sunday of December - primarily a run-up to Christmas, a sort of prelude, making us more ready to enter into the excitement, the realization and the wonder of the first coming of Christ. But it is more than that, isn't it? On Advent Sunday we look back, both to Bethlehem with the birth of Christ and forward to the end.

Thomas Cranmer, who in 1549 produced the first English prayer book, the forerunner of the Book of Common Prayer, drew together the first and second comings of Christ in the beautiful collect for Advent Sunday:

'Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son, Jesus Christ, came to visit us in great humility, so that on the last day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.'

So in a very real sense the season of Advent encourages us to prepare not only for the first coming of Christ in his birth - the beginning of salvation for his world - but also his coming again - the beginning of the next stage of our spiritual journey.

We have that hope that God will eventually bring a resolution to the world's hatred and evil - a culmination. For his purpose in this world creation does matter. I cannot imagine and do not have a picture at the back of my mind of that final ending which will bring for us a new beginning. However I do believe that there is a sense of an ending, a resolution.

We sometimes cry out: 'Lord, how long before hatred and evil will stop?!' And in that cry we are saying there will be an ending, all the promises of God will be fulfilled and they will be fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In him is the 'Yes' to all God's promises.

That hope is what we look forward to - that hope is promised us.

This world is loved by God and matters to him, and in some way - we don't know how - this world will achieve its total fulfilment in Jesus Christ.

Let's take that hope with us this Advent as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Saviour of the World.

With warm greetings

                           Angela