Reflections from Alette

Transcript:

Hello, everyone. My name is Alette, and I just wanted to take a few moments to talk to you about advent and what it means to me and hopefully to you. I can think of going back to when I was much younger. Almost every year, I remember in elementary school before I came to this country back in the Bahamas, I was chosen to play Mary in our Christmas play. I must tell you, I didn't understand the context, obviously, of everything yet. I somewhat understood the story of Christmas and that Jesus' Birth meant something special to us. But I didn’t understand, obviously, the full value of that.

So, of course, in getting ready for Christmas plays, the word is getting ready. There's a lot of preparation. But I didn't mind being Mary because there was not much preparation for me. I had to wear costumes that I loved, which were made for us. And I just had to sit there and I had to do face gestures. So I appreciated that. But as I got older, and even now as my faith is increasing, I understand the value of preparation and what Christmas really means. I understand that even as we are focusing on, you know, the Jesus story and Luke, that there was such preparation for this day to come. There was so much anticipation. And the foretelling of it, and I love how Luke told the story.

Luke, who had the historical context as a Jewish person, was speaking to people that were not Jewish, that did not have all this information. So he was giving them so much detail. He was giving them so much information. He was giving them so many facts. My favorite verse was Luke 1:1, the introduction. He sounds so confident. He said, “Look, many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us. So a lot of us have put in the work to tell you what has occurred, just as it has been handed down.” 

Luke was a witness to what happened and is speaking to a group of people that are not Jewish, who did not witness these events. So he had to give them details just as they were handed down to him by those who, from the first, were eyewitnesses and servants of the Lord. So Luke narrates this story from the beginning, giving details, giving historical context to a group of people that did not know, that did not have this background. And that's important because not everyone grows up in the Christian faith. And even now in doing this, my hope is to somehow share the story of the gospel, share the story of the goodness of Jesus, that Christmas is about the Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah that came, the divine one that is God that came, humbled himself in the form of a child, in the form of a man to save humanity for us.