Advent Waiting

Advent arrived quietly this year, like dawn edging its way across the horizon, slow, pale, insistent. In the midst of the flurry of life (both snowy and metaphorical), I almost missed it, this season that resists hurry. This season that asks us to linger in the waiting. This season that reminds us we live in the in-between space, caught between realized promises and promised prophetical fulfillment. 

And so we light our candles one by one not to banish the darkness, but to remember that God often speaks in the gentle glow before the full day breaks.

When I was little, waiting felt simple. December stretched out before me like a glittering road, each day carrying a small ritual of anticipation. We waited to put up our Christmas tree, choosing just the right moment so that its light would feel especially magical. We waited to fill in our nativity scene, because baby Jesus had to be hidden away until after the candlelight service on Christmas Eve. We waited to light the final Advent candle, watching the circle of light grow week by week. Waiting then had a sweetness, an innocence, and a certainty that joy was on its way.

As an adult, the waiting has changed. It no longer fits neatly into the little cardboard doors of Advent calendar or a the stapled red and green paper of a Christmas countdown chain. Now the waiting is layered and oddly textured, a mixture of hope and vulnerability, joy and grief. 

Waiting is such a present feature of life, yet I don't feel all of it until Advent. Sometimes waiting is just annoying painful: I wait for applications to move through systems, even though I know my carefully crafted writing is being screened by AI. I wait for an advisor's email, guiding me on the next step of my project. I wait for the snow plows to come through my street so I can safely drive to Aldi. There is joyful waiting too, of course: The anticipation of a sibling's wedding, planning for a grandparent's birthday party, organizing a surprise celebration for a friend who will unexpectedly be in town. These are the sorts of waiting that I feel now.

But I also wait knowing beloved family members with chronic illness will eventually pass away, that my grandparents will someday leave us. I wait for losses I dread yet cannot prevent. I wait for the kind of healing that I know might not come in the way I hope.

And sometimes I wait for things it is hard to believe will ever happen —
waiting for bombs to stop falling across the world,
waiting for people to move through life with gentleness and love,
waiting for unjust systems to yield to justice,
waiting for the raw grief of a childhood friend’s tragic passing to soften into something bearable.

These forms of waiting do not resolve themselves at 6 a.m. on December 25. They stretch across weeks, months, and years, shaping us as we live inside them. They ask something deeper from us. They require a patience and a hope that is less like the quick excitement of childhood and more akin to what a redwood seed must think of when it starts spreading roots in the ground.

This is the terrain of Advent.

It teaches us that waiting is not empty but formative. Patience is not endurance; it is a willingness to let God’s unhurried work unfold within us. Hope is not merely a feeling. It is resilience rooted in God’s faithfulness: the God who has come, the God who remains, the God who will come again.

Still, the “not yet” can feel vast. It holds our unresolved prayers, our frayed relationships, the ache of injustice, the wounds we carry quietly. And yet, even here Advent insists that we are not abandoned. God’s presence weaves itself into the ordinary: into conversations that offer unexpected grace, into moments of stillness in fresh-fallen snow, into the gentle nudges of the Spirit that steady our trembling hope.

To live Advent is to hold light and shadow together without rushing to resolve them. It is to believe that God is already sowing restoration in places we cannot yet see. It is to cradle a hope that leans forward toward a future God is shaping even now.

So may this Advent find us unhurried.
May it teach us to dwell fully in the “not yet,” trusting in the miracle that God meets us.
And as we wait for answers, for healing, for justice, for joy, and for peace, may we sense the quiet approach of the One who comes to make all things new.