This morning, as I waited for my one year old to wake up, I found myself slowly sipping coffee and looking at our Christmas decor. As I fumbled to find the correct sides of the Christmas countdown blocks, a slowly-building sense of joy bubbled up inside me. “Christmas is less than two weeks away” I said to myself with a little half-smile.
Moments later, I remembered that I needed to do the dishes from last night and that feeling left me as I sauntered over to the sink. But for a moment there, that child-like spirit of Christmas from my youth resurfaced in me simply because I rearranged the countdown blocks.
Whether it is the last second buzzer beater, the closing minute of work, the day before your baby’s due date, the last week of high school, the first month of your new job, your final year of college, or your fiftieth year of marriage, you are always counting the moments. Although some of us may never be able to tell you what today’s date is, we can tell you how long it has been since the Cowboys won a Super Bowl or how long it will be until we are on that vacation.
Countdowns give us something to anticipate, something to anxiously await, something to long for, something that we believe will give us a renewed sense of hope. This truth is not isolated to our present moment, but is true even in Scripture.
After the Book of Malachi closes, the people of God experienced 400+ years without the voice of God, without another prophet, without another covenant, and without another countdown clock to God’s rescue. The people of God were left in silence. They were left in darkness. All they had to cling to for nearly seven generations would have been the ancient promises of God that said that one day He would send a Messiah to save His people from this darkness and silence (Gen 3:15, 49:10; Ps. 2; Isa 7, 8; Zech 9; Mal 3, etc.).
Yet out of the darkness He came. Out of the silence was the coming of the King. All at once, the promises and prophecies of old were fulfilled in God taking on flesh and becoming a man. In one sense, the advent season is a season of remembrance as we look back on God’s faithfulness to do exactly what He said He would do, but in another sense it is a season of hopeful anticipation as we wait for His second coming.
Recently, I wrote a monthly newsletter to the men of Mosaic expressing some of my difficulties with the Christmas season. For me, each December begins and ends with the painful reminders of lost loved ones, dismembered relationships, and the feelings of childhood loneliness. Yet, year after year, by the grace of God, the darkness gets pushed further and further away. If you are entering this season with the pain of loss, I stand with you. If you are entering this season with the gaping hole of a loved one who just last Christmas was celebrating with you, I weep with you. If you are entering this season disillusioned by years of disappointment with family relationships, I pray with you. If you are entering this season with a new sense of joy and peace and hope after a prolonged season of darkness, I rejoice with you. For all of you who are in Christ and anxiously await His life-altering, light-bringing, and hope-filled second coming, I wait with you, but I do so in hope knowing that God has been, is now, and will always be faithful to deliver His people.
Brothers and sisters, I pray that you would not let this Advent pass you by, but that you would slow down, take it it all in, and join with me in one voice and triumphantly sing the words of a nearly 300 year old hymn:
Come, thou long expected Jesus
Born to set thy people free
From our fears and sins release us
Let us find our rest in thee
Israel's strength and consolation
Hope of all the earth thou art
Dear desire of every nation
Joy of every longing heart
For His Glory and our good,
Finn Foster
