Category: Advent

It Will Not Delay

It Will Not Delay

The wallpaper of my phone is a picture of a quote which says, “It will surely come, it will not delay.” Next to the plastic, rose-bespeckled skull on my desk at school is another quote which says, “The Lord is not slow about his promise.” I think I feel compelled to post these passages of Scripture around my life because I feel like I’m inclined to not believe them and I know that I must.

I find myself doing similar things in other situations, too. There is a massive paper I need to write (yet which I have done essentially nothing on) and I have a desire to write about the role of hope in suffering as a Christian. This is not because I feel particularly hopeful or because I view myself as a very good suffer-er. And yet there is an attraction to this tension between suffering and hope. Or, as another example, recently, I read the description of a fictional story and it repelled and annoyed me, sounding far too similar in some ways to my own life, and so I bought it.

I’m not sure I love the tension that life offers to me and yet there is something intriguing about it. At times I run from it, not wanting to parse the particular stresses and contradictions in life. Other times, I sprint towards it, wanting one strain of my heart to engage in a head-on collision with another. Or for the misconceptions or untruths I believe to smash brilliantly into the truth or clarity which they don’t want to encounter.

Perhaps it is simply reflected in how I feel about Advent. I love the time of anticipation, the preparations, the slow moving from darkness to light, the delayed gratification. However, I also feel the tension in the season and am quick to see how I also greatly dislike that same tension in my own life, when the end of the journey is not quite so clear-cut and the conclusion unknown. The season of Advent continually calls this tension to mind as we prepare both for Christmas (clearly marked out for December 25th) and the end of our lives (very unclear and uncertain for most of us). It is a delight and a sorrow, a thing of great pleasure and one of profound suffering. Yet it is a tension in which we all must live.

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In The Heart of Our Darkness

In The Heart of Our Darkness

My heart is filled with so much longing.

Is it the season of Advent which fills it with yearning and anticipation? Or is it the state of my being at this time? Or is it simply what it means to be human?

Regardless of the cause, I am left in the agony of waiting during these shortening winter days. In some ways, anticipation is delightful, inviting a sense of looking forward to something and a source of hope for the future. Yet in other ways it can be draining, one’s being filled with a fervent desire for a fulfillment which is not yet here and the remembrance of that lack is persistent. While we cannot change that we wait, we can change how we wait. In recent days, two things have come into my mind and heart which have invited me to consider how I’m waiting even if they don’t completely change my experience of it.

The first was a moment in prayer a few weeks ago. It can be easy for me to feel that while God has a plan for me, He has perhaps overlooked moving forward with the next step. Yet I know that God wastes nothing, forgets nothing, overlooks nothing, and is in no way negligent with any aspect of any person. So what came into my prayer was the image of my whole heart, my whole being, every drop of my present life and circumstances being poured out into His hands. Like a bucket of water, it flowed from me and was captured tenderly, completely in His cradled hands. As individual drops moved toward the edges, seemingly prepared to fall carelessly to the ground, Our Lord managed to keep them all within the crevice of His hands.

Nothing was lost.

No fleeting emotion was unworthy of His attention, no aching wound escaped His notice or care, no mundane moment of my life was devoid of His presence and acknowledgement. I’ve come back to this image many times. My whole life, the complexities of my heart, the things I love and hate are all held by Jesus. Nothing escapes His notice or loving gaze.

The second is the idea of not letting my heart be troubled. It has come up in various ways and in different devotionals I’m listening to or reading. What has caught my attention most recently is the idea of letting my heart be troubled. So perhaps my life is filled with waiting and uncertainties. At least I can strive to not be troubled by the lack of clarity, to receive what is offered from the Lord and trust that He will provide. The storm can rage around us, but we can seek to not let the storm become interior. Not being troubled becomes an incredibly active thing rather than the passive thing it might sometimes seem to be.

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You Can Waste It

You Can Waste It

Not too long ago, I was helping with a retreat and someone at the table was commenting about experiencing a cold shower that morning. It wasn’t presented as a major concern, but it was definitely something not desired by the individual. Another person at the table mentioned that he could offer up the cold shower. His reply was, “I don’t want to.” And I, quick with a witty and brisk response, jabbed, “You don’t have to offer it up. You can waste it.”

My own words have kept, for lack of a better word, haunting me over the weeks since that moment. Alongside it is the recurring question, Am I wasting it? Am I wasting my present suffering?

It is incredibly easy to look at someone else’s life and to see the moments when they should choose virtue. While it might take some learning and study, it is simple to offer words of wisdom, guidance for how one ought to live. Yet it is remarkably difficult to choose to accept one’s own wisdom or to live in the way one knows one should. The words which easily rolled out of my mouth have continued to stare back at me, probing me and provoking me, asking if they bear any resemblance to my own life.

I don’t want to waste my suffering.

Yet it seems that to offer up my suffering means I need to really be aware of it and consider it more deeply. If I’m going to offer it to the Lord, I need to recognize it. This, however, it not what I want to spend my time doing. Ignoring the present pain is a bit more comfortable. Instead of staring my longings and unfulfilled desires in the face, I want to avoid them and distract myself with something else. I think I tend to waste my suffering because I don’t want to keep acknowledging it and relating it to the Lord.

Underlying this avoidance of facing my suffering is perhaps the fear that if I keep looking at it, really seeing the tender point of pain and longing, then I might be prone to bitterness. It is already far too easy for my heart to grow bitter, with the Lord or anyone else. I think there is a worry woven into my heart that if I keep seeing this suffering and keep offering it back to the Lord that I will instead just tire of the process and get angry. If I avoid it, the slow-burn of annoyance will maybe just stay in the background. If I continually confront it, who knows what it will become?

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Waiting Without (A Foreseeable) End

Waiting Without (A Foreseeable) End

When asked why I chose Advent as one of my favorite seasons in the liturgical year, I replied that I appreciated the anticipation. Then, realizing what I had said and the truth of it, I considered how I also liked the set ending point of the anticipation. We are asking for Christ to come in a new way at Christmas and then He comes, December 25th, like clockwork. A definitive period of anticipation marked by a definitive end.

Life, however, is not like this.

Yet I have also come to realize that I am in the Advent of my life. Perhaps, however, we are always in an Advent. Maybe we are always saying, “Come, Lord Jesus” and hoping for a particular fulfillment. There is no definite end in sight, though. That which we long for and ardently desire isn’t simply four weeks away or even a year away. Instead, we wait and we hope. Even if it is clear that the Lord has a plan, it is eminently unclear how it will unfold. Will our desires be answered just as we long? Or will there be some circuitous, meandering path to fulfillment, realized only years later when we look back and can say that God answered, just behind a guise or beneath a veil.

I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.

Psalm 27

Advent is a time of anticipation, diving headlong into our hopes and desires, while also ordering them anew. It is a time of preparation, reminding me that I must always be actively preparing to welcome Jesus, even while my heart is led to long for other, earthly things, good as they may be. If the Lord came tonight, like a thief, I would be saddened if my response must be, “I was simply waiting for you to give me this particular gift and then I was going to….” How much better to be always in a state of welcoming and preparing to make room.

These past few months I’ve been taking a class on the problem of suffering. The proposal is that as Christians, we must hold that God, being good, allows the suffering from which He can draw a greater good for us, which could not be arrived at without the suffering. From philosophers to novelists, we have wrestled with this experience of suffering coursing through humanity, trying to see how it is both a mystery and yet also a means to encountering God. After one evening of reading, I was forced to look at my life and say to myself, “Everything in my life is offered as a way to draw me nearer to the Lord.” It was almost unbelievable, as I gazed at aspects I wished were otherwise, longings left unfulfilled, and wondered why God couldn’t have caused me to grow in some other way apart from the soul-deep suffering. While left with no definitive, particular answer, there is a comfort in trusting that the Lord will make His plan known at some point between now and eternity, revealing to me the ways particular pains were offered as gifts.

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The One Longed For And Yet Present

The One Longed For And Yet Present

The longing of God’s chosen people fills the Old Testament.

For generations they are waiting for God to redeem them, to restore their nation, and to enter into a new and lasting covenant with them. They tell their children and their children’s children about His mighty works and the promises God has made to them. While they don’t know how these promises will be fulfilled, they trust that they will be.

I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will meditate on all your work and muse on all your mighty deeds….You are the God who works wonders, who have manifested your might among the peoples. With your arm you redeemed your people, the sons of Jacob and Joseph.

Psalm 77:11-12, 14-15

For years I’ve viewed the birth of Christ as the end to their waiting and a fulfillment of their longing. All that they were waiting for was there, wrapped in flesh, lying in a manger. The King they were waiting for had come. We celebrate Christmas with that in mind: the Hope of the Nations is born and so we rejoice.

Yet this year I was filled with a recognition that one of the most important moments in human history happened and yet virtually nobody knew about it at the time. Similar to the quiet yet monumental yes at Mary’s Annunciation, the birth of Jesus took place in a relatively hidden way. Angels told some shepherds and wise men arrived from the east, yet as a whole, Israel was unaware of what was happening in their midst.

On the day after Christ’s nativity, they awoke….and didn’t know that anything was different than the week before. They still longed for a king and awaited the redemption of Israel. Yet He was there, the little King, already laboring to save them. When they gathered in the synagogue to pray, recalling the promises and the works of God, they did not know that the incarnate God was with them. As they provided work for St. Joseph, they did not know that it was the God-man who crafted and created alongside him.

Christ was living and working in the world and yet the world did not know it.

For thirty years, Christ was hidden. He lived the ordinary life of a son, a neighbor, a faithful Jew, and a carpenter. People laughed, worked, ate, prayed, talked, and experienced life with the God-man and did not know it. The One an entire nation longed for washed His feet to remove the dust, ate His mother’s food, and slept deeply after a day of laboring.

He was there, known and yet unknown.

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