In Preparation for Advent
Advent is a season of preparation, but sometimes, even a preparatory season requires its own preparation. Advent should prepare our hearts to celebrate the coming of Christ, but combining what has become a yearly season of stress with the challenges we’ve experienced over the last 20 months, we may need to prepare for preparing.
When you make a meal, you might prepare by getting all the parts and measuring devices you’ll need out first. But before that is the pre-preparation, making the grocery list, buying the items, getting yourself ready to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. The time leading up to Advent should be like that. Advent is when we make the meal, the time leading up to that, when Christmas music is already on the radio and catalogs are coming in the mail and the news is telling you it may be difficult to find what you’re looking for, that season, right now, is the pre-paration. In this season we need to get ourselves ready so that the baking, the shopping, the infuriating repetition of “Holly Jolly Christmas'' and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (in every store!) and the people determined to steal your spot in the parking lot don’t cause you to miss the actual Advent, Christmas itself.
Advent is a season but the Advent was a moment in time when Christ was born. We, of course, celebrate that on December 25th, but if we aren’t careful we’ll let the Advent season ruin our celebration of the actual Advent. We can become like Martha, busy working away in the kitchen and we can do it with a rotten attitude. A meal made in bitterness will taste bitter, a gift given begrudgingly will be entirely dissatisfying, singing Joy to the World in a humdrum or callous way will have the same callusing effect on your heart. In this season, as a runup to Advent, we need to be preparing our hearts to receive the wine of gladness that overflows, the bread of heaven that satisfies our deepest hungers, the most extravagant gift that God gave in the Advent of Christ.
Get in the word now, read one of the gospels through November, get your playlists ready, order/check out some books to read as a family, pray for a soft heart and a gospel backbone that will make you like a rock, honorable and immovable in a sea of chaos. Advent is meant to be a joyous and restful season, but no one is able to snap their fingers and suddenly be joyful or at rest. We must get ready. And as we do, I pray the great chorus of Handel’s Messiah will warm and fill your souls with the unconquerable light of the Lord, “The kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. And He shall reign forever and ever. Hallelujah!”