As we approach the end of the year, most of us are going to be thinking about what we want to get done in the coming new year. We’ll find a quiet moment and begin to write down our hopes and dreams for 2025. This, of course, will begin the process of setting goals for 2025. 

I didn’t grow up in a liturgical church and as a result, I was in seminary before I was introduced to the Christian year. The small Baptist churches I grew up in started preaching about Christmas the Sunday after Thanksgiving and we started with the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Imagine my confusion when I encountered Advent and realized liturgical churches didn’t preach the Christmas story until December 25. Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, was a time of preparation.  Those of us who tried to introduce the Advent calendar for our Baptist congregations were left bewildered when Advent would start on Thanksgiving Sunday. Most of us would end up trying to squish both sermons together like a leftover Thanksgiving Christmas sandwich. 

Wanted: Dead or Alive" posters are the staple of all the great westerns. Sometime during the movie, someone will pull out a folded piece of paper with the words "Wanted" stamped in large letters across the page. In the middle of the page will be a pencil sketch of a face that could have been anybody in America, but the bearer of the paper is sure it's a picture of the cowboy standing in front of them.

In a great movie, there’s always something that’s about to explode. The nuclear reactor in the sub, the boiler in the train engine, the engine on the airplane…the scenes in the movie jump from a rising pressure gauge, the sweating engineers, and the tense lip biting by-standers. While great in movies, these pressure cooking scenes are horrible ways to live and unfortunately, the scene I just described is the inner life of most pastors I know. If we could see the drama going on inside them, I’m afraid we’d see a rising pressure gauge and a sweating engineer trying to keep things from blowing up.