Waiting in joyful hope, Advent brings out the best in us. 

Advent is a time for endurance, waiting, quietness and joyful hope. Scripture says “It is good that one wait quietly for the Lord’s salvation” (Lamentations 3:26).

How unlike the commercial pre-Christmas season with all it’s noise and impatience! How different from the preoccupation with material things, and with the buying and selling of trinkets and gadgets and the latest fashions!

Advent calls us to a renewed sense of wonder and beauty and peace. This is what we long for—the truth of our existence revealed in the most unremarkable way, the birth of a little child, the most vulnerable and innocent of all God’s creatures. 

Can it really be true that what we seek most desperately in our heart of hearts, our deepest and most ardent longing, will come to us in this way? No artifice. No pomp or circumstance. No bravado. Will he really come like a thief in the night, noticed only by outcasts and foreigners, and laid in a manger with an ox and an ass?

During Advent, we renew this joyful hope. Life is not as complicated as it seems. The hopes and fears of all the years are addressed with radical simplicity: Love comes to us in the form of a child, calling us to throw off all our anxious burdens and cast aside the baggage of our impatient adulthood. 

It is good that one wait quietly for the Lord’s salvation.