It is difficult to believe that today is the first day of December. Where has autumn gone? Where has 2021 gone? This year was our emergent year from our Pandemic. We received our vaccination jabs in the late winter and the early spring…and believed that happy days were here again. No face masks for us who had received the vaccine…until the ‘Break-Thru COVID’ cases began appearing.

During our May Maine Holiday, it finally dawned on me that restaurants across our country were experiencing severe labor shortages. Prior to that we were at our favorite restaurant, Cunetto’s House of Pasta that is located on the Hill in St. Louis, Missouri, and witnessed that only half of the establishment was open due to not enough help.

I was in Kroger supermarket yesterday and there was the strange combination of many empty shelves and two manned check-out areas with lines that snaked around the aisle… Life has changed for us…and we are yet to understand…how much. And, so, we are seekers of solutions and answers to our new reality…as well as the individualized reality that each of us live with on a daily basis.

Christmas has come again. One of my blogger friends asked, ‘Why do we have to include religion in everything?’ I think his question is valid. I have been a Christian for over 50 years. I became a Christian because the love of Christ compelled me… I have been a member of 4 churches during the past over 5 decades. Some for much longer periods than others. First Presbyterian Church of Carbondale is my longest and I am sure that I have found my natural Church Home. It seems to me that there is the religion that many enjoy proclaiming and broadcasting…and there is the ‘Quiet Faith’ that you go to bed at night with and wake up the next morning…with the same desire to seek and understand God and your role in his creation and his plan… The people of faith that I want to be my mentor are those that never feel the need to announce their faith. They quietly go about doing good unto others…and look for neither recognition nor praise…and are embarrassed when someone mentions their good service to their fellow woman/man.

Church simply does not have all of the answers that you seek. The congregation is a gathering of honest hearted people that are seeking the faith… Many churches garner large attendance by assuring those in their midst that they have the dogmatic and final answer from God and that their leader heard from him personally…this morning… We humans like certainty and definitive answers. But, ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.’

The Quiet Christian…sees a hungry person…and feeds them…and a lonely person…and they sit with them and learn of them and become their friend. They pray for those in need…not because another human gives them the definite answer that God answers prayers…but because they have faith that he does…

Christmas is coming…and the lonely need a friend…the hungry need something to eat…the homeless need shelter…

Seeking God…and religion…and faith…can be found in the eyes of your neighbor…who you practice loving…as you love yourself…