A Prayer for Advent

A Prayer for Advent There’s nothing like being a kid around Christmas. What starts as a quiet excitement begins building more and more each day as it gets closer.. until you can hardly think about anything else. (Anyone else remember eating all the Advent chocolate or the frenzied destruction of those paper calendar chains?) This anticipation is often looking forward to the different family traditions of the season, sweet treats, or let’s be real, the presents… but there’s something we can all learn from the almost magical childlike wonder of Advent. Although Advent, like much of our lives, is made up of waiting… we get a lot worse at it as adults. Forget about waiting with wonder or excitement. Instead, we get caught up in the drudgery and demands of the more consumer-minded focus of this season and often lose sight of why it all matters. In reality, our excitement should be even more contagious than that of kids when we remember we’re celebrating, as C.S. Lewis put it, “…a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” How wild is that?! We get to celebrate the incarnation– the moment God became the smallest human imaginable, a baby, to walk among us and invite us into a relationship… upsetting the powers that be by loving the marginalized and the forgotten. And not only did he come once, but he will come again... which is more good news! The God who loved us enough to walk alongside us, will be coming again as our judge AND our advocate… that’s something to anticipate with wonder.