Advent pathways

The lectionary readings this week contain the famous Prepare Ye the Way comments from Isaiah 40. I googled "pathways" looking for a picture to put on the Advent mural at the front of the church.

Guess what I got pictures of?

Yep many pretty pathways to quiet English lanes, a few desert pathways as befitted the reading and rather unexpectedly several diagrams of neural pathways (and other sorts of circuit diagrams)

Which got me thinking about the interior pathways that need to be prepared during Advent...waiting isn't just a matter of sitting still (or pacing up and down the train platform).

As Cheryl says, real waiting is holding the space. And physiologically speaking preparing the way is actually remapping the neural pathways which, in my head at least, circumnavigate my brain by the millisecond helping me to do everything but hold the space.

Hopefully Darren will blog about the external pathways which we need to prepare but for me at this point, how do I prepare the inner pathways, past the "seeming to wait", to the real stillness of listening waiting at the heart of Advent? What are the wilderness parts of my mind which need to be straightened out and built up to enable Christ to be born in me this Christmas?