“God is coming! God is coming! All the element we swim in, this existence, echoes ahead the advent. God is coming! Can you feel it?” ~ Walter Wangerin Jr.

If you’ve ever seen a live birth, you know that there is nothing like it. Nothing to describe it except words like, “miraculous,” “awesome,” and “amazing.” There is something about the birth of a child that commands the attention of everyone present.  But it isn’t as much about the birth as it is the result of the birth – the baby.

A newly born baby is like nothing else. It is what causes grown men who are now called “Daddy” to weep. It is what causes midwives and doctors and doulas who have been soundly sleeping to burst into flight at the ring of a phone and run out the door. Why? A baby is on its way and as one midwife told me, “its addictive – who wouldn’t want to watch a miracle happen again and again?”

But the baby comes through labor, often arduous and painful. Some happen so quickly the mother seems in shock to be holding the baby in her arms. Some happen so slowly the mother wonders if it will ever end – when will she finally be able to hold this child she has carried for so long?

I happened to run into one of my best friends at a birthing center yesterday. She is 5 days before her due date, happily waiting and anticipating her little boy to come. I touched her swollen abdomen and thought, “And this is what I am doing now, too. Waiting and anticipating a child. Not my own, but God’s child. God’s Son.”

I don’t remember Advent as a season growing up. I only remember Christmas itself, which was always fun and memorable and full of love and laughter.

But since I have had my own children, I have fully engaged myself in Advent and seen its purposes.

For those of you who may not know, Advent is a season observed in many Christian churches as a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus at Christmas. The term is an anglicized version of the Latin word adventus, meaning “coming.”

Advent is waiting.

Advent is eagerly expecting.

Advent is like a spiritual labor of sorts.

We who already know Christ prepare ourselves once more for His Coming. We seek to make room for Him – the one for whom there was no room in any of the homes of Bethlehem.

Because as we all know, the month prior to Christmas tends to be the busiest, most “stuff-focused,” event-filled, (often stress-filled) month of the year for many families.

To make room for Christ during December, to be still and wait upon Him in eager anticipation, to push aside our “to do” lists for awhile and open our eyes and our hearts and our Bibles and simply wait on Christ is to engage in counter-cultural behavior for America in December.

But He is the only gift worth waiting for. The only gift worth anticipating. My girls started asking me about Christmas before Thanksgiving. And I knew that the only way for them to understand when Christmas falls on the calendar is for us to participate in Advent.

For kids who still mix up “yesterday,” and “Tuesday” and “next week,” Advent provides them with something even my three year old can do – count the days up to 25. Celebrating Christ each day, I cut slips of paper with a Bible story on each and put them in each day of the advent calendar we have. They took turns getting the slip out each night for Daddy to read to them. “Only 1 more day until Christmas!!” they said today.

What are we waiting for, really? What are they waiting for with such anticipation? Is it gifts under the tree? A sweater we will one day give away? a toy that will one day be at the bottom of the toy box?

What this Advent as taught me, what it is still teaching me, is that I am waiting to receive Christ. Every day, soaking in the desire for the Heavenly King who humbled himself to take on baby skin and complete vulnerability…so that He would know and understand our human condition, so that He could live the perfect life we never can (no matter how hard we try), so that He could die the atoning death that pays the price for our sins…

ultimately….He came so that He could be with us. Personally and Intimately. Forever.

This is the thing worth waiting for, worth anticipating, worth reveling in at Christmas. Receiving the One who alone can save us, change us, fill our empty spaces and flood our darkness with light.

As Ann Voskamp says in her wonderful Advent devotional The Greatest Gift that I have chewed on each day of December, “Your greatest gift is not your gifts, but your surrendered yes to be a space for God. ….You are most prepared for Christmas when you are done trying to make your performance into the gift and instead revel in His presence as the Gift.” 

To wait upon Christ like my friend Emily waits for her baby boy who will be born any day now…with joy…with expectancy, with focused care and loving desire.

“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given” – What will it look like for you to open your heart and your soul to Christ this Christmas? And every day, receive the gift He is giving you – the gift of Himself ?