Advent: The Season of Waiting and Preparing
Watercolor Advent Wreath by Freepik
Advent greetings to you! In the Christian Calendar, the season of Advent began this past Sunday (November 27) and it’s the four weeks leading up to Christmas. The season of Advent is all about waiting and preparing our hearts for Jesus’ arrival.
In our Christmas-obsessed culture where Christmas décor is sold at Costco and Target as early as September, it’s easy to forget there’s this other, much longer season that precedes and prepares the way for Christmas.
The rest of society usually skips it and goes right to Christmas but it’s Advent that makes Christmas more meaningful in the same way that the 40 days of Lent make Easter more meaningful.
So how do we fully live into Advent the same way we would into Christmas?
Well, of course I have resources that I love and recommend:
Additionally, we have the practice of lighting our Advent wreath. Just as Jewish people have the tradition of lighting a Menorah candle during Hanukkah, we Christians have an Advent wreath where we light one candle for each week of Advent. Each candle represents a gift that God brings to us through Jesus: Hope, Peace, Love, and Joy.
Here’s the thing about each of these gifts though. They’re not outside of us and something we wait to receive. Hope, peace, love, and joy are already inherent within us and we awaken them by putting them into practice. This is the meaning of Jesus’ name, Emmanual, God among us. God lives within us.
So don’t wait around for your Christmas miracle to appear—for Santa to fulfill your wishlist or for your spouse’s annoying habits to suddenly disappear.
Create Christmas magic by activating hope, peace, love, and joy within yourself this Advent season.
We can’t change others. But when we change ourselves, it has a ripple effect upon everything and everyone around us.