Advent begins the end of this month and is a great time to pause and ponder all that God has given us.

If you are looking for more information about Advent download my free Advent Resource Guide here.  Or perhaps you may enjoy exploring some of the past posts I have written about this season:

What is Advent and Why is it Important

15 Inspirational Quotes about Advent 

Mary and Elizabeth – a Lesson about Advent

Is Your Advent Full with Stuff in your Hands or a Heart Stuffed with Joy?

My gift to you this week is 10 inspirational quotes about Advent that I haven’t shared before here on Healthy Spirituality. Take one into your prayer, journaling, and time with God. May the words bless your Advent season.

“For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning – not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.”

― Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

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“At this Christmas when Christ comes, will He find a warm heart? Mark the season of Advent by loving and serving the others with God’s own love and concern.”

― Mother Teresa, Love: A Fruit Always in Season

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“Advent Prayer

In our secret yearnings

we wait for your coming,

and in our grinding despair

we doubt that you will.

And in this privileged place

we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we

and by those who despair more deeply than do we.

Look upon your church and its pastors

in this season of hope

which runs so quickly to fatigue

and in this season of yearning

which becomes so easily quarrelsome.

Give us the grace and the impatience

to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,

to the edges of our fingertips.

We do not want our several worlds to end.

Come in your power

and come in your weakness

in any case

and make all things new.

Amen.”

― Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann

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“One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God’s grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can’t grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of the soul.”

― Michelle Blake

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“Here’s an Advent illustration for kids — and those of us who used to be kids and remember what it was like. Suppose you and your mom get separated in the grocery store, and you start to get scared and panic and don’t know which way to go, and you run to the end of an aisle, and just before you start to cry, you see a shadow on the floor at the end of the aisle that looks just like your mom. It makes you really happy and you feel hope. But which is better? The happiness of seeing the shadow, or having your mom step around the corner and it’s really her?

That’s the way it is when Jesus comes to be our High Priest. That’s what Christmas is. Christmas is the replacement of shadows with the real thing.”

John Piper

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“Anticipation lifts the heart. Desire is created to be fulfilled – perhaps not all at once, more likely in slow stages. Isaiah uttered his prophetic words about the renewal of the natural Creation into a wilderness of spiritual barrenness and thirst. For him, and for many other Old Testament seers, the vacuum of dry indifference into which he spoke was not yet a place of fulfillment. Yet the promise of God through this human mouthpiece (and the word “promise” always holds a kind of certainty) was verdant with hope, a kind of greenness and glory. A softening of hard-heartedness, a lively expectation, would herald the coming of Messiah. And once again, in this season of Advent, the same promise for the same Anointed One is coming closer.”

Luci Shaw

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  “Advent is the perfect time to clear and prepare the Way. Advent is a winter training camp for those who desire peace. By reflection and prayer, by reading and meditation, we can make our hearts a place where a blessing of peace would desire to abide and where the birth of the Prince of Peace might take place.

Edward Hays

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You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net that you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing the love of God made present in the manger.

Brennan Manning

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He became what we are that he might make us what he is.

St.Athanasius

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Don’t forget to download your free Advent Resource Guide here.

In 2014 I wrote an Advent devotional that has reflections and quotes. It’s called Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room and available on Amazon.

Which of these quotes touched your heart?

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