How to Survive Advent Even if You’re Not Feeling It
The season of Advent begins a fresh, new year for Christians, and it is not by accident that they start the annual holy journey in the darkest days of the year, remembering how God promised--and promises--to bring us hope, joy, love, and peace through Christ.
But that's sometimes really hard to feel. Or to live. Or even to believe.
The Advent of 2005 is burned in my heart’s memory forever. I had been pregnant for the first time earlier that year, and after a deep, intuitive “knowing” that things just weren’t right, suffered a late miscarriage. It shook everything in me; I remember asking Dr. Billy Abraham, one of my most orthodox seminary professors, “what kind of piss-poor God does this? Either he [sic] should have designed things so as not to allow miscarriages, or at least not let a mother’s heart get so attached.” In his wisdom, he treated my rant as a rhetorical question, and responded with a grace-filled, expansive, understanding presence.
Fast forward to that Advent.
I was pregnant again, and Christmas Day corresponded with the time in my last pregnancy when I miscarried. So, it was a surreal Advent season, leading Bible studies and worship all about Mary and waiting and pregnancy, longing so much for my own child…all the while marveling at the fact that I had no control over whether that gift was to be mine or not.
I could hope. I could wait expectantly. But I could not make it happen.
It was the first time in my life that I craved something to the marrow of my bones, yet could not make happen for myself. And it is this elemental yearning and need mixed with helpless, vulnerable desperation that, for me, embodies the wisdom of Advent.
Yes, there is a place for the sparkle and merriment of Christmas, for sure. But in my experience, it is so much sweeter and organic when it follows a season of looking face-to-face at that which we believe we can’t live without, fully acknowledging our inability to make it happen for ourselves.
And then—every time, if we have eyes to see—something, somehow, someway, breaks in. There is a hope, a peace, a joy, a love, a light that we couldn’t fabricate ourselves, and it is oh-so-sweet. We are held. We are saved.
That wasn’t the last time I’ve touched that vulnerability so intimately; it seems that all of us, if we dare, are invited to dance with the darkness at times. But I now have the “gift” of being able to look backwards, knowing that this is how God works: not causing or preventing tragedy, but by redeeming it. Of course, its rarely on our timeline, and highly unlikely (in my personal and professional experience) to be in accordance with our own strategy and tactics. That’s what makes it God.
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Some have asked if the pregnancy made it to term. Yes, blessedly, it did. But, truthfully, that is beside the point of the story for this season. Even if it hadn’t, God would have found a way to break through. I’m certain.