Advent Waiting

From a Word from Becky, my monthly newsletter to my readers

Dear friends,  

Happy Second Week of Advent!  I continued this past week to ponder Advent as the season of waiting.  How often do we find ourselves in the posture of waiting?   

Oh how we wait…  

• For an answer  

• For grief to release us from its mighty wave 

• For a relationship to heal  

• For financial resources to make ends meet  

• For births – of children, of creative projects, of new seasons  

• For the right time to say “yes” to God’s invitations and call  

And on and on our list of things we are waiting for would go. Waiting can feel hard at times.  We long for something that is not yet there.   

Advent’s waiting invites us to acknowledge our spiritual poverty.  All of us in our lives will encounter our spiritual poverty…a moment where we run into our lack of something.  Things beyond our control.  In essence, we run into our utter dependence on Jesus. We realize we need a Savior.  What we come to realize when we have the courage to name our places of waiting and our places of spirituality poverty, we encounter the place that Jesus most seeks to draw near to us.    

As we move out of the first week of the Spiritual Exercises and enter in the second week, we pray with the Contemplation on the Incarnation.  In this meditation, we imagine the Trinity looking down at the world and seeing people waiting.  They see the spiritual poverty of their people. The Incarnation is the Trinity making a choice to draw near to the suffering of humanity. They chose to lean into us. They chose to send Jesus to come as close as possible to the poverty of their people.  They came to support us in our waiting.     

Advent is acknowledging our utter need for a Savior.  Advent reminds us that we cannot wait in hope alone.  Advent invites us to cry out the prayer, O’Come, O’Come Emmanual.  Beckoning Jesus, Our Savior, to come near to us in our places of waiting and need.    

 I encourage each of us to embrace the Trinity’s gift of leaning into us and in turn, lean into them.  Our hope and strength comes from accepting their invitation to be with us in an intimate, personal way in our places of waiting and spiritual poverty.   

 This week, let us pray not only for ourselves, but also for each other the Advent cry, O’ Come, O’Come Emmanuel.  Know I am praying with you and for you!  

Peace, 

Becky 

Photo by Saa R on Unsplash