Advent Season

 

God of the watching one,
give us Your benediction.

God of the waiting ones,
give us Your good word for our souls.

We all have a sense of longing and knowing that we have to harness patience for certain things. We do not generally like being patient, especially in this modern day of being able to receive satisfaction almost immediately. In ages past, the things we receive quickly now might have taken days/weeks. Letters and correspondence, for example. Today we can send instant texts and emails. Just twenty years ago a letter would take several days to get to a recipient and there were no cell phones. There are good aspects of being able to communicate quicker, but in an interesting way it could also mean something is lost in depth and detail that used to be shared in letters.

Something I have been pondering lately is how as we ache for something that seems just out of grasp, it is God we ache for, even if we do not see it. Always - in everything. While we search for that which will make us happy in this world, the deepest desires can only be satisfied in God, which is where our desires are meant to be derived. We are fools to seek anything outside of God will fulfill us, and as the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us it is like chasing the wind. You will never catch it.

I am thankful for this season traditionally spent waiting and seeing the light amidst darkness. It reminds me that we are not able to see the future - we do not know what is coming next. If we think imaginatively as if we were living B.C. in this advent season, we could ponder what it might have been like before the incarnation and get a sense of the sort of darkness the world was enshrouded in. We are people who have come after the Light has been in this world in person. We have the advantage of knowing that part of the story, and we sit in the dark for the next part of the story, always with the Light to guide us.  God does not leave us alone in that journey. He gives us a great Light of the world.