This Advent, make room for a future without fear

December feels like the soft landing every year could use. While January is often propelled by a crazed monster of executive function—New Year’s resolutions, goals and budgets, new semesters and scheduling!—the end of the year generally drifts through gentle, benevolent hours like a hushed twilight snowfall. January stares forward and plans. December gazes backward and reminisces.

We who celebrate Advent define these weeks as a beginning nonetheless, though this fresh church calendar has none of the energy and ambition of a secular new year. During Advent we simply sit in the dark—and wait. Like seeds buried in soil, we anticipate the new life that will emerge from this apparent inactivity. Waiting, after all, isn’t the same as doing nothing. Waiting involves an expectancy that something is coming, that change is possible, that a transformation of the present reality is just around the corner and may be closer than we imagine.

Waiting is, essentially, an act of hope. Those in whom hope has been extinguished expect nothing more than more of the same.

At the end of another long year of sickness, when a return to normalcy still feels elusive, another season beckoning us to be patient may be a little harder to embrace than usual. The streets still feel meaner than we want them to feel. The cautious way we’re obliged to live for the holy sake of each other is getting threadbare. Another day of masking up. Another shot in the arm. Another hesitation at the sight of a stranger and the reflexive mental measurement of the space between you and them. All of this takes its toll.

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