As the world continues to recoil over the recent shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, California, bombings in Syria, and a stabbing in the subways of London, as people around the planet wonder out loud who will be next, and as peace loving beings the world over seek to come to grips with what seems to be, for most present lifetimes, unprecedented waves of evil, we rightly ask:  what about God?  What does God think?  What is God doing?
     Though I do not pretend to know all answers in this regard, I can say that, as I consider the shape of the Advent season through which we are journeying, God is working. Thousands of years passed from the time of God's initial promise to send a Messiah to the day on which Jesus "finally" came into the world, thousands of years of war, crime, pain, suffering, and uncertainty, thousands of years in which people wondered:  what is God doing?
     But in the "fullness of time," as Paul puts it in his letter to the church at Galatia, Messiah came.  In the crowning moment of kairos, the culminating confluence of human and divine destiny, Jesus appeared on earth.  At the prophetic point of truth, God came. When people least expected it, God appeared.
     In the face of the horrors we have witnessed recently, it's exceedingly difficult to believe in God's presence, highly challenging to believe in the fact of divine love and compassion.  But we must.  We must believe in God's fullness, we must believe in God's time. We must that even if we do not seem to see him, God is there.
     Why?  Because we can.  We can believe that God is, as the writer of Hebrews asserts, the same "yesterday, today, and forever."  Of this, the evidence is clear.  God is here, and he is working, his sight unclouded, his vision intact.  
     And he's inviting us to believe it.