Hello Bridge Town Church and those of you joining us online. My name is Gavin

Bennett and I'm Bethany Allen and this is the third four-part Bridge Town

Daily for the Advent season.

This week we're exploring the Advent theme of peace. If we look back over the

last year that is in most circles ominously known as 2020 we can't help but

reflect on a few significant and trying things. Things like a global

pandemic that has shut down most of the world, impacting lives and many

businesses and causing thousands to lose their jobs and primary sources of

income. Things like the reckoning and wake of racial injustice that God is

using to heal and rid his church of the sin of racism. Not to mention one of

the most divided and hostile elections in our nation's history just to name a

few. Between the civil unrest the seeming crumbling of the global economy

unprecedented unemployment millions and millions of people sick and dying.

2020 may be the closest thing that many of us will ever know to the experience of

war but you didn't need us to remind you of all of that. You know it. You feel

it deep in your bones. You also know that now more than ever we need peace.

The problem though is that for many of us peace feels like a far off and if

we're honest unrealistic possibility. We think it's something that only comes by

chance or through more work than we're able to put in. Peace feels like

something people feel and know in children's books or fairy tales but the

reality is that peace is elusive and improbable if not impossible. The chaos of

the world that surrounds us not to mention that of the world inside of us is too

...