Hi, my name is Pete Scuzaro. I want to welcome you today to the emotionally healthy leader podcast. And today's title is

surrender to Jesus' birth in and through you. That is surrender to Jesus' birth in and through you this Christmas season.

So we're going to do something highly unusual today. and I'm going to lead you through a daily office.

A daily office is an ancient spiritual practice that goes back to people like David in Psalm 119, where he writes seven times a day, do I praise thee?

Daniel and Daniel 6, where we observe him praying three times a day. We see this as well

in ancient Judaism and Jesus Day where they prayed morning, midday, and evening prayers,

and then picked up by the Desert Fathers in the second, third, and fourth centuries,

and then really through the monastic movements through the last 2,000 years.

And it's a very rich, powerful spiritual practice that we've sought to recover and bring back to

the larger church today. And the daily office is really about creating a rhythm in our days,

hopefully morning, midday, perhaps evening, to stop and be with Jesus, commune with Jesus,

so that when we're active, the rest of the day, we are abiding in him, remaining in him,

remembering him, praying always, as Paul wrote. And again, the focus of a daily office

is communion, being with Jesus, not to get

something from him, which was much of how many of us were taught about getting quiet time and interceding

and learning scripture, which is all important. But the focus of the office is a communion. And silence and stillness is a core component of it. That's why I wanted to do this today in this season where there's so much stress and anxiety. It's just so easy to get disconnected from ourselves. And we start living out of a false self, not out of the unique

persons that God has made us to be. So many of us were trained to do devotionals. That is,

the emphasis is more on content of thinking, the mind, and we'll read scripture and read something

devotional, and then we might ponder it in silence.

The emphasis of the office is the emphasis is silence and stillness, and then there's scripture as well,

but without the silence and getting rid of the noise, it's difficult to hear what God is saying. And I would like to contrast it this way,

that for most of us, we were more focused on content and then maybe some silence, perhaps,

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