"Do You Hear The Angels Speaking To You Tonight?"

Christmas deliveries to the poor in Oklahoma on the eve of the 4th Sunday of Advent. Here is another one of Robert Waldrop's all-too-infrequent posts on his Catholic Worker Blog: On Pilgrimage in Oklahoma City.

We got to St. Charles parish and there were people there waiting for us. Lance Schmitz and his wife (I missed her cello recital last night, , as I was making up the route lists for today's delivery, two members of the theological faculty at Southern Nazarene (Lance is a real organizer), Marcus Evans, Sean and I. We prayed and thanked God for this opportunity and then got the truck loaded in no time with all kinds of food, powdered milk, beans, rice, apple sauce, orange juice, cases of miscellaneous "meal helpers", peanut butter, spaghetti sauce, a ton of food, literally. The back of my pickup was filled with boxes of stuffing and cases of mushroom soup which I got at discount stores (they weren't available from the food bank), 210 loaves of bread donated by a certain friend who donates bread every month, and several bags of candy cans and chocolate Christmas candy.. 200 Better Times were in the front seat. I had the delivery routes sorted geographically and typed for the volunteers. We were set. (Many thanks to Marcus Evans who kept the Regional Food Bank initiative going and pushed it right through to a successful beginning.) Well, not quite. We decided we needed more flour, so I gave Lance a hundred dollars and sent him to Buy for Less. The people there asked him as he was loading up the flour, "Are you with that big guy with the beard who comes in here and buys everything in the store?" He said yes, hehehe.

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So that was my day, tomorrow is the 4th Sunday of Advent, Gaudete (Rejoice) Sunday, and we certainly have much to rejoice about. We will hear the reading, "For behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel. It is also a reading in which St. Joseph is prominent, and that is always special for us because St. Joseph is so important to us. Mary, a single woman, pregnant, and Joseph knew for a fact that he was not the father. Yet, he trusted God, believing the word that the angel had brought to him, and he kept his faith with Mary and took her as his wife. "He did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him." If only more people would follow his holy example and do what the angels of the Lord are commanding them to do. Sure, it's not hard to notice that we are surrounded by evil, but we are also surrounded by good. There are angels everywhere, offering help and hope to us, and most importantly, bringing the word of God to us. Do you hear the angels speaking to you tonight? If not, "be still and know that God is Lord", and perhaps you will hear the angels God is sending to help you through the trials and tribulations of your life.

Read the rest here.

There's more of Christmas there than in a thousand red-ribbon-wrapped Lexii.