How are you feeling this Advent? What’s going through your mind?
Top of the list for many of us is ‘there is exhaustion’ – the last two years have been extraordinary and, while things are more normal than they have been in a while, the cumulative effect of the pandemic-induced changes and challenges lives on. We’re looking forward to Christmas but, if we’re honest, we’d rather have a nice long nap.
Fear and darkness
For others of us, ‘there is fear’ might be up there too. It’s not just the world as a whole that is facing challenges, but our evangelical constituency is facing unprecedented pressure from the outside and a humbling awareness of some things that are very wrong on the inside. Whirring in the background of many a mind is a sense of insecurity – an awareness that there is likely to be further challenge and change ahead.
Of course, those things are linked to the enduring effects of the Fall. ‘There is darkness’ is a reality that all of us have to wrestle with as we live our lives. Whether that’s the horrors of abuse, the pain of illness, the grief of loss or the constant drain of being surrounded by hearts that are hardened to Christ, this life hurts. And we really would like it to hurt less.
The list could go on. Every reader will be in a different place, have a different set of struggles with which to wrestle this Advent time. A different list of hardships and burdens that weigh us down.
Looking back
Those emotions are not new. Rewind time to the weeks before Jesus’ birth and we see echoes of the same responses in people’s lives. It was a dark world. A silent world. 400 years since God had spoken through His prophets and the need for a Messiah was clear for all to see. Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary had to make their way to Bethlehem for the census, finding no place to stay but a room with the animals – dirty, smelly, not the place you want to give birth. The darkness, the fear, the exhaustion is palpable as the narrative goes on.
Light of the world
What joy then, that a few days later, angels could announce good news and the suffering, tired and scared could gaze in wonder at the new baby laid in a manger.
He had come to be the light of the world. To be the one who welcomes the heavily laden and gives them rest. To be the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep – so they, we, could know the security of salvation – both now and forever. The family, the shepherds, the men from the East may have known the pressures of life in abundance but that week they could gaze on God and know something more: ‘there is hope’.
Looking forward with hope
The message of Advent is no different for us. The pain of sin and suffering may be all too real but our gaze can go forward to Christmas and there, in the incarnation, is pure and eternal hope. Hope that the pain we are experiencing is not forever; hope that the challenges we are facing are all under the sovereign hand of the one who loves and leads the best; hope that our sins – hideous though they may be – can be forgiven and our hearts changed if we truly repent; hope that God’s Kingdom will keep moving forward until that day He returns, even if we can’t see the signs where we are.
They’re profound truths. Sure truths. Ones deeply embedded in love. So, this Advent, however you are feeling, whatever is going through your mind, remind yourself of one unending truth: in the darkness, in the fear, in the exhaustion – there is hope. And it is good.
