Advent Snuck Up On Me
Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas, has snuck up on me this year. It has taken great energy to grow present to the season. I come into Advent full from enjoying God’s healing touch in my soul and in the lives of others whom I love, full from acquiring two additional children through marriages to my oldest two. I adore them both and they are fabulous spouses to Madison and Keegan.” I am holding in tension these goodnesses with the reality that I feel poured out and empty as well.
Looking back over the years, I find that I often come into the Advent season feeling a bit fatigued. Homeschooling was the legit culprit for 14 years. But, between the emotional taxation of navigating Covid and its impact on us and the world, our political culture, and transitioning into a full-time job that isn’t mothering for the first time in 25 years, I come a bit emptier than in the past.
Covid has prevented me from medicating with little shopping trips to Target or TJ Maxx just to fill my eyes with beautiful things or purchase some special bottle of olive oil. It’s kept me from life-giving face-to-face time with friends. It has brought forced weaning off of comfort and pleasure amidst an emotionally and physically demanding season.
There has been much goodness, loss, joy, and strain. I suppose coming empty isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, that’s a good deal what Advent is about. Waiting in emptiness for the fulness of the Messiah. Choosing the emptying of our souls to create space for God’s infilling. So, perhaps I’m primed for the season in an unexpected way. Even so, I’m struggling to engage.
Day one of one of the three Advent devotionals (apparently I’m needing an added measure of nourishment) I’m reading said,
Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming (Matthew 24:42). ‘Come, Lord Jesus,’ the Advent mantra means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now. This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. This is exactly what it means to be “awake.” Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and a forewarning about the high price of consciousness. —Richard Rohr
As I read, I sensed an invitation from Jesus to awaken, to invest the energy needed to attune to my thoughts, feelings, emotions, and body. To be awake is to create space in my days to ask Jesus to show me the ways I’m resisting the deliberate emptiness which creates greater space for God to fill me with more of Him in this season. It means attuning to the ways I am feeling the pressure to create my future rather than rest in a future created by a good God. It means being thoughtful about where I’m demanding immediate gratification or filling myself with comfort, pleasure, control, approval, or power to ward off the discomfort of unfulfillment which creates space for God.
Perhaps this is a taste of what John the Baptist meant when he exhorted, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” This is not easy work—awakening to the parts of me seeking life outside of the abundant life He desires to pour into me and release out of me.
So I say, “Come, Lord Jesus. Come into the emptiness of a long-time relational longing which you’ve not yet seen fit to satisfy. I am tired and battle hopelessness as I wonder and wait at your seeming lack of responsiveness in this area of my life. Your redemptive movements in other areas of my life are incredibly visible this year and I thank you for visible signs of your love and power. As I hold these poles of emptiness and infilling in tension, I cry out, ‘How long, O Lord?’ Once again, I rest my head between your shoulders and allow you to unravel my clenched fists which some days I shake at the emptiness—shake at you. I awaken to the many emotions and powerlessness I feel and fall into your care once again. Remind me that all is grace and that your goodness is in the here and now of this emptiness. Remind me as many times a day as needed that your infilling is more satisfying than any other pursuit. Assure me that I can rest in the future you are creating for me to walk into.”
How do you come?