Light Advent Musings

Week 3

Waiting for Something to Begin

This Christmas we will be celebrating our fourth annual "Last Christmas in This House"...

When my husband and I retired four years ago, it seemed like a good idea to downsize and move from our corner of northern Illinois to some place outside Minneapolis to be closer to our kids. I painted the hallways and started getting rid of things. Then some disappointing medical tests followed by surgery postponed our move. Recovery well in hand, I started boxing books and painting over 20-year-old stenciling...until more disappointing medical tests, unrelated to the earlier issues, followed by more surgery, more recovery. Our move postponed again, we had high hopes for this year. We painted bedrooms and boxed more books and met with a realtor...two weeks before the Covid-19 stay-at-home order was issued for Illinois. Once again, the beginning of our new life in the wilds of Minnesota is on hold.

Waiting for something to begin has a forward looking tension to it, different than the tension of waiting for something to end. Unlike waiting for something to end, we are not necessarily getting away from something but actively anticipating going toward something. We see a hope, a goal, a promise we know we want or we need or we are pretty sure will happen. We just haven't arrived at the place where that something has yet been fulfilled, been made real. And so we wait.

Advent, this season of the year, has that forward looking tension. Most years, we would be waiting to celebrate Christmas, waiting to gather with loved ones to eat, to exchange gifts. We would be waiting for the eve or the morning of Christmas to go to church and sing carols with those who also look forward to the celebration of Christ's birth. Despite the strangeness of this particular time, this particular Advent, we still wait for however we will uniquely celebrate Christmas this year to begin - family gatherings masked, social-distanced, or zoomed, Christmas services masked, social-distanced in-person or streamed. We still wait for something we know will begin, no matter how different it may look this year.

Advent, the big one, the centuries-long one, had that same forward-looking tension. A Messiah had been promised to God's people. He would come and change everything. Something new would begin. When and how, well, that was open to some speculation, but He, the Messiah, would come and God's people would hope for Him, look for Him, wait for Him to begin the fulfillment of the promise made in the Garden.

As often happens with those things we wait for, we get in our minds how we think things are going to work out, how the beginning will look, but God, in His funny little, and big, ways, manages to surprise us. His people were imagining the sudden appearance of a mighty political or military leader as savior. God instead began the fulfillment of the salvation story with the birth of a baby to an obscure couple in a small town. This beginning could easily have been missed by many, and for the most part, it was. But those who were looking for something to begin saw it. Mary and Joseph saw it. Mary's cousin Elizabeth saw it. Poor local shepherds saw it and wealthy royal foreigners traveled a great distance to see it. Not a bad beginning...

Something to Ponder:

Read Luke 1:5-7, 24-25. Elizabeth and Zechariah waited a long time for parenthood to begin. Read Luke 1:39-45, paying special attention to verse 45. (If you have the time, read Luke 1:5-80 for the whole story.) Think about all the waiting that was happening in these verses.

Something to Pray:

Think about the waiting of both Elizabeth and Mary. With Luke 1:45 in mind, bring before the Lord anything in your life you are waiting to see fulfilled, that you are waiting to begin. Ask God for the faith, the believing He wants you to have, to see you through the waiting time. Ask God for the grace to accept what His vision for your future is, that your expectations would align with His.