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3 Daily Disciplines


My wife Sally loves an Advent Calendar, preferring traditional ones to those that dispense chocolate, gin or expensive jewellery (phew) and her latest purchase, based on a picture of Edinburgh which she usually visits every December but cannot do this year, arrived yesterday... And It prompted me to think again about how I will be marking Advent this year... especially with it starting in lockdown.
My life is largely dictated by my diary and when I couldn't get access to it for various reasons over the past couple of weeks, and when my PA was on furlough recently allowing me to slip back into my habits of diary-mismanagement, my life was little short of chaotic, event though I (like most other people) wasn't actually going anywhere!!! 
Over the next few weeks in the run up to Christmas, despite the lockdown, my diary could once again spiral out of control... But to help me (and perhaps others) to be a bit more reflective I am actually, over the next few days, going to add three things into my daily schedule...
Starting tonight, and at the end of each day, prompted by the US tradition of "Thanksgiving" I am going to resume a practice I used to observe in November each year, ie #30DaysOfThankfulness... Thinking back over the day and posting online something that has particularly registered with me that day...
Then, tomorrow morning (I should really have started today, but OOPS!), and every morning of Advent thereafter I am going to resume my #AdventArt posts... an artistic ignoramus's offerings of pieces of art inspired by my reading of the Daily Lectionary for Year B in the Revised Common Lectionary . A couple of people asked whether I was going to do it this year and then this morning I got a like on the first of last year's posts from the actual artist, so I thought, why not...
And then third but not least, from the 1st of December I am going to seek to practice something I suggested in writing this year's Roots Worship and Learning Resources and shared with my congregation in the Grosvenor Hall on Sunday... I gave them a 6x4 grid which I called a "Compassion Calendar," the idea being that in each of the boxes on the grid they/I should think of some act of compassion that they might perform each day of December up until Christmas day... remembering of course that just as a dog is not just for Christmas, compassion is not just for advent... This last one I will not be sharing online, as I believe that our acts of compassion should be private things...
So... thats what I am adding in to my advent calendar this year... 
Shalom
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