For my mother, identifying good people was very easy. She was convinced that anyone who wore a cross around their neck was good. They could be in prison, they could have stolen the cross, they could simply be wearing it as jewelry, but to my mother this was like a neon sign that flashed “good person.” Perhaps this was her way of navigating through a difficult and sometimes scary world. Perhaps she was sure of the power of the cross. Perhaps she just wanted to believe that all people were good. Despite my best attempts to convince her otherwise, my mother believed that anyone who wore a cross was a good person. The reason I have been remembering this is that recently, while reading a novel, I came across a sentence that I cannot get out of my head. The author, Fredrick Backman, was describing one of his characters and said of him, “he has seen good people capable of great evil, but also terrible people capable of great goodness.”(The Winners: A Novel) Initially, I thought about how true this statement was in my own life. It did not, however, take long for me to begin to wonder if the way I lived my life made others believe that I was a good person. More importantly I began to wonder if people really can tell that we are Christians by our love? Do our actions reveal that we are beloved children of God who desire to follow the way of Jesus? In the Season of Advent, we are told over and over that we must prepare the way for the Lord. We are told that we are to be the new prophets who with our words and our deeds proclaim that the Messiah has come and that he will come again. Through our attempts to live as Jesus lives and to love as Jesus loves, we are to proclaim that salvation is at hand and that there is indeed reason to hope. Despite the competing secular messages that seem to be way more slick and way more enticing, we who are followers of Jesus Christ are urged to quiet down and acknowledge our need for a savior. In this season of Advent, which is like Lent, a season of conversion and penance, we are, by following the teaching of Jesus, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and by the help of the Sacraments, to become internally and externally the holy and extraordinary creatures that God made us to be. Put another way, we who claim the crib as the fulfillment of our hope, we who claim the cross as the way to eternal life must follow the example of that person we meet in the crib and on the cross. We must not only follow Jesus, but we also must live his love and reveal his victory over evil, his destruction of death, his light overcoming darkness, and his promise to return to us in time. While we all know that good people are capable of doing evil things and terrible people are capable of good, and while we too may believe that anyone who wears a cross is automatically a good person, our quiet time in Advent reminds us that goodness is not something we can fake or something we wear. Instead, goodness comes from our realization that just as Jesus has loved us from the crib and from the cross so must we love at every moment of our lives. It is only when we take up our crosses and it is only when we joyfully and generously heed the teaching of Jesus that we can be sure that others can know that we are indeed followers of Jesus Christ on our way to an exalted destiny.