I really need to work on blogging on a more consistant basis but ever since I have found TWITTER... well typing less that 140 characters is much easier than typing an entire journal entry... so maybe I should begin to piece together my tweets and make a blog post ;)

I just want to wish the world a very Merry Christmas! May your hearst be filled with the peace and joy of our Savior who offered Himself for us, nailed to the wood of the Cross!

This Christmas is different in many ways, I suppose that is certainly part of growing up... For the first time I do not have a winter break where I spend a solid month in VA with my family. This is the first time I have come home to VA with armfulls of wrapped presents and a suitcase. My grandmother is no longer with us and my family is certainly feeling that pain, especially my grandfather and mom. Lindsey and Scott (sister and brother in law) aren't coming in until Christmas Eve from Arkansas. My cat isn't with me this Christmas either, crawling up into the tree...

This year I have been able to enter into Advent in a new way, while realizing for the first time how much I do not enter into the liturgical season and get caught up in the secular aspects of it all. I had my first staff Christmas party which was a wonderful blessing, my Pastor is amazing to me, like a second father. I starred in my first Christmas pageant since the 8th grade and without even knowing my lines had to learn another part and smoosh them together. Hahahaha...

All of a sudden Christmas is around the corner... and what stuck out to me last night in prayer?? This:

"Oh come oh come Emmanuel and RANSOM CAPTIVE Israel that mourns in lowely exile..."

I am that ransomed captive, I am Israel for whom he came to die.

In how many ways am I a captive of my own sin, my actions and decisions? I am not a captive of the flesh, that is a gift of God. I am not a captive of Satan, my Baptism claimed me for God. I am not a captive of this world, my faith, my Church and my God teach me to live in and not of it. I am only a captive to my own sin... MINE. And that, my brothers and sisters, is captive enough.

He RANSOMED me... his blood was the ransom for my freedom. He paid the ransom for me, that captive, and that ransom was the blood flowing down the splinters of the cross into the earth. I was bought, purchased, ransomed.... me. I wasn't locked in a tower, guarded by a dragon and saved by Prince Charming... I die inside myself... not to myself... in my heart, mind and will I choose sin and there I am enslaved... I chain myself... and then came Christ not on a white stallion but on a bed of hay... to shed his blood to tear down the walls of my heart and chains of my sin and to claim me once again as His.