WHEN WAITING AND LONGING IS A GOOD THING

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that Advent is about waiting and longing…and this is a good thing for us.

Can I ask you to be grateful with me on this #ThankfulThursday?

I know it is difficult.

Every fiber of your being may be resisting it…I know.  I am feeling the weight and heaviness of the world too.

I had such a warm, lighthearted, practical post written for today.  Really, I did.  One in which I was hoping to give ideas, activities, books, and resources to help you prepare for Christmas during Advent.

Things like surprising your kids after they are in bed by waking them up with hot cocoa and a late night drive to look at Christmas lights.  Or making a list of all the great quotes from “Elf.”  Or bundling up under a cozy blanket and reading Silver Packages by Cynthia Rylant.

Then I turned on the news.  And those things seemed so very far away.

How does the song go?

Have yourself a merry little Christmas 

Let your heart be light

From now on 

Our troubles will be out of sight

Really?

Don’t you wish it were that simple?  Christmas comes and the troubles of this world just fade away?

Not going to happen.

 

“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes…and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1943

 

Waiting and longing for what?

While we prepare to celebrate Christ’s birth, we also wait and long for His return.

For things to be made right.  For every tear to be wiped away.  For justice and mercy.

I read a post a few years ago by Sarah Bessey that helped me better understand this season:

 

“If Christmas is for the joy, then Advent is for the longing.

The joy doesn’t erase the the longing and the sadness that came before but it does redeem it…

But the joy is made more real, richer, and deeper perhaps because we longed for it with all our hearts for so many days.”

 

There is real pain and suffering in the world…and in my own little corner.  I think of a woman broken, weary, and raw by a husband who left her.  A little girl stuck in a hospital being poked and prodded struggling to fight leukemia.  And a friend bruised and crushed, both body and soul, by addiction.

This is real, hardcore stuff.  This is what happens in the waiting and the longing.  This is the prison cell of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks.

So why is is good for us to wait and long?

Because waiting and longing are a part of life, not just Advent.  We are continually waiting to become, to discover, to complete, to fulfill.

And we know there is more.  We know things should be better.

The world is not as just, not as loving and kind, and not as whole as we know it can and should be.  And neither are we.

We have a deep longing for things to be as they were meant to be in the world and in our own hearts and lives.

And this realization…this longing…this yearning…this fervent expectation…brings us humbly to Christ.  Or at least it should.

It gives us reason to live in hope:  that He came to open the door from the outside and free us from our pain, our fear, our loneliness, and our sin.

I think that those of us who know what it means to wait, who truly grasp the intense feeling of longing for something more and something better, can enter into this season of Advent in a real and powerful way.

We acknowledge and recognize that here in this place of waiting and longing God has come and God will come again, but that right now, in the midst of pain and suffering, God comes. 

Emmanuel:  God with us.

As we wait and we long, we have a God who weeps with us.

And that, my dear friends, is something for which we can be truly grateful on this #ThankfulThursday.