Waiting can be excruciating…especially if you don’t know what you are waiting for. One of the hardest things for me about Advent in the midst of my spiritual dessert was the loss of hopeful anticipation.
The Christmas season has always been, for me, marked by magic and hope and love, and the anticipation only made these feelings grow. There was a sense that somehow I was cosmically connected to those people who thousands of years ago were waiting for God’s incarnation. They were waiting. They were watching. They had hopeful anticipation. And many of them did not even recognize it when it came.
No matter if you look at the Christmas story through the lens of historical fact, tradition, or prevailing myth – there is something to learn here. First, often times the Divine shows up in ways we are not immediately able to recognize. Conversely, that means that it might feel like God is missing when, really, we are just looking for the wrong thing.
Second, it is possible to have hopeful anticipation even if you don’t yet know what you are anticipating. Liminal space, the space between the end of one life season and the beginning of another, can be simultaneously the most painful and most generative of times. It is in these spaces that we “become.” The old structures are stripped away and the new are slowly, but surely rebuilt – leaving us vulnerable and open and malleable in the process.
I want to encourage you, friends, to join in on the hopeful anticipation. It is ok to walk in this mystery even if you may see it differently than those around you, or than you have in the past. It is ok to wait expectantly for something unknown. It is ok to shout out to a seemingly-empty universe that you are waiting for something. Just don’t be surprised if the response comes in unexpected packaging.
Love, joy, and strength to you all today, friends.
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