Thanksgiving has passed and the Christmas decor is going up as quickly as humanly possible. The shopping season for the holidays has begun, and our lives begin to get increasingly busy and frantic as we busy ourselves with purchasing gifts for our friends and family members. It seems that Thanksgiving rolls right into Christmas without anything in between.
One of the most ancient practices of the Church, however, is to celebrate a season of reflection and preparation prior to Christmas Eve called Advent. Initially a penitential season during which people would reflect on their lives and how they could live more faithfully into the teachings of Jesus, Advent was a season of preparing for the coming of the Christ child on Christmas morning. To that end, The Episcopal Church in Parker County is offering a prayer resource for you this Advent season despite the busy-ness of modern lives.
The Rev. Hunter Ruffin, the priest-in-charge for The Episcopal Church in Parker County, is inviting you to try out a daily practice of prayer as a way of committing to a new practice for the short time of Advent.
Our hope is that you will use this resource as a way of learning how to pray on a daily basis. With short scriptural readings and a few meditation questions each morning and evening, we can each go a little deeper into faith.”
By subscribing to our email list, you will receive an email twice a day – once in the morning and once in the evening – with a short prayer form that you can pray to begin and end your day. The morning prayers will feature a reading from the Gospels, the four books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus’ ministry. The evening prayers will feature a reading from the Hebrew scriptures, which are commonly called the Old Testament. To subscribe to Praying Advent, go to https://www.episcopalchurchparkercounty.org/praying-advent and complete the online registration form.
The Episcopal Church in Parker County is a new church plant meeting on the far western edge of Fort Worth in the Diocese of Fort Worth. The community gathers on the first and third Sundays of each month to pray together, to plan together, and to enter into fellowship with each other and with God. Anyone looking for a new church home and interested in working towards the launch of a new church is invited to join community for upcoming events. You can find more information about the church plant by visiting their website, http://www.episcopalchurchparkercounty.org.