Advent, a season of waiting, began on Sunday. Perhaps this year such a sense of waiting feels commonplace. We’re all waiting to see family members or friends, or return to our offices, or attend a concert or a play again. For some, though, such familiarity with waiting makes it feel stale, if not bitterly ironic.
How do we faithfully await redemption in a year of waiting for relief?
Whatever your feelings about Advent this December, we hope that our devotional readings stoke the fire of anticipation for Christ’s return within you. CT Projects Editor Kelli B. Trujillo opened the series on Sunday. She pondered the “in-between” way that John must have felt as he wrote the book of Revelation while in exile.
“Some two thousand years later, we still live amid these overlapping realities,” Trujillo writes. “Here, between Christ’s first coming and his glorious return, our lives may also feel like a mix of kingdom and confidence alongside waiting and suffering.”
Similarly, in tomorrow’s reading, priest and author Fleming Rutledge writes, “Advent tells us to look directly into the darkness and name it for what it is. But this is not the end of the story.”
As we await Christmas Day, may we approach Advent with intention. While we grieve great losses in our own seasons of waiting, we can have confidence and hope. One day, Jesus will return. And when he does, he will draw us out of the temporary, in-between places and into the culmination of a glorious, triumphant story.
