Meet Jesus - First Sunday of Advent 2022

When you were a little kid someone had to teach you how to meet people. We don’t think about it a lot, but meeting people is a skill and like every skill we can be better or worse at it and we can improve or get worse. Two factors influence our practice for anything: the probability of the event occurring and the importance of that event. The greater the probability or the importance of an event the more preparation for action we are willing to undertake. The Lord tells us in the Gospel for the First Sunday of Advent of a meeting between him and us which will happen and which will be life altering. He will come again and his coming will change everything. Given the probability (100%) and the importance of this meeting (infinite), we each need to ask ourselves a question: Does my entire way of acting in the world reflect the fact that the King is coming and I will meet him?

But how? How do you get ready to meet Jesus at the end of time or at the end of your life? The same way you get ready for any other thing: you practice, and you learn from others who have practiced. You learn how to meet Jesus by meeting him and learning from others who have met him.

What kind of meeting do we need now to practice? The meeting we desire to have now with the Lord is one that leads us to discover (or rediscover) who Jesus is, why he matters, and which leads to a desire to follow him as a disciple. It is only that type of resolve that will make the meeting we experience at the end of time not be like that of strangers but rather that of friends. A disciple is one who has resolved to run to meet the Lord in every aspect of his life his life has been changed because he knows Jesus. He is a friend of the king who is coming.

How can you set aside 5 minutes each day to meet Jesus?