Advent Week 1: Waiting

Location: Fabric Store
Matthew 24:30-31;42-51

​"So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him." (Matt 24:44, NIV)

Hi friends! So glad to be back with you during this Advent season. In the weeks leading up to Christmas I’ll be doing a dislocated devotion series about the themes of Advent. This week’s theme is waiting. 

My husband and I have been talking about buying a sectional for our house for about four years now. We have a nice couch we received from a family member but it’s not the kind of couch that you can fall asleep on while watching a movie. So after four years we finally bought the sectional in early November and planned to transform one of our rooms into a nice relaxing media room. We’re so excited but we can’t get the sectional delivered to us until January 21st. And my husband and I are very much immediate satisfaction people. We would have wanted them to deliver the sectional same day. But nope, we have to wait.

And so, we’ve waited. And while we’ve waited, we have cleaned the carpets and painted the room it’s going in. We’ve tinted the windows to prepare the room to be a four season room. We’ve gotten appraisals on moving a vent in that room. We’ve bought rugs and pillows to decorate. We handpicked the fabric for our homemade ottoman. We’ve decided on our artwork. And we’re even talking about repainting more furniture in the room before the sectional comes. Our waiting has been long, but it’s also been very active and productive. 

And it dawned on me that this is exactly what Advent is all about. Advent is a time in the church calendar where we have an intentional time of waiting. We prepare our hearts while we wait to celebrate Christmas and the remembrance of the Word becoming flesh so that the whole world could be redeemed. And we also have an intentional time of waiting for Jesus’ second coming, where Matthew tells us Christ will come on the “clouds of heaven, with power and great glory” (Matt 24:30 NIV). 

And while we wait for both of these times, we wait with an active waiting. We clean the carpets of our hearts. We refinish the walls of our spirit, we decorate our souls with compassion and we choose to wear the fabric of Christ. 

"...we wait with an active waiting." 

The waiting for the second coming may last a whole lifetime (or it might not!), but in this specific Advent season, this waiting can practically look like choosing a spiritual discipline to practice during the 25 days of Advent. If you were part of the spiritual thanksgiving challenge, you can choose one of those practices to practice every day through Christmas. For me, I’m choosing intercessory prayer so you can hold me accountable to it! 

And you also may be waiting for something else. Waiting for answered prayer. Waiting for a diagnosis. Waiting for reconciliation with a family member. Waiting to not feel so lonely anymore. 

And while you wait, you can actively wait with hope. Hope that we can be transformed to look and act like Jesus who, in the words of Athanasius, became what we are so that we might become what he is. Hope that, like Jesus, our lives can be used to heal, comfort, and lift up others. Hope that every painful and tragic circumstance can be used for something good - and hope that God will bring all things into perfect redemption and restoration in the kingdom to come. 

So today, though the waiting may seem long, you can choose how you’ll wait. So how will you wait?