This Advent season has impacted me in small yet profound ways. Parts of me that have become dormant because of the business of life have been awoken, and they have found an audience for their longing in my heart, a listening ear bent toward their pleas. I have been mulling on the concept of waiting (inherent the meaning of the word advent, which is “coming” or “arrival”), and the role it plays in the journey of faith and in life in general, as well as on its connection to every aspect of the human experience and the entire spectrum of human emotion. And I find myself wondering why we don’t intentionally engage with this concept more actively. We avoid the pain of waiting by trying to distract ourselves or focusing on the other non-pain-inducing parts of our lives or our world, but then are we robbing ourselves of something important and necessary?

In one of the videos for the IF:Equip Advent Study Emmanuel: Sixteen Encounters with Jesus, one of the ladies mentions how it’s so easy to enter into the advent season and jump right to the exciting celebration of a waiting fulfilled (Christmas!) that we either skip or only superficially engage with the weight of the waiting that preceded that first “advent” and the weight of the waiting we still live with. Our eternal hope is not completely fulfilled yet, and many of our temporal hopes don’t even offer the same guarantee. That is significant truth, and it affects every aspect of how we live and hope and continue to wait for both things of this earth and things of heaven. And I wonder: what would a year of Advent look like, be like? Not just a Christmas-themed advent, but a year of intentionally digging into my waiting rather than distracting myself from it. A year of examining what I’m waiting for, why, and how that informs my faith journey.

So I’m thinking about making that my focus in 2018. I may blog about it, but that will depend on a lot of factors I can’t predict right now.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.