Hope

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

every year it seems to come a little earlier.

The lights, the trees, the decorations... the Black Friday shopping that creeps into Thanksgiving. The Christmas specials and the Christmas movies.

Tis' the season...whatever that means.

Today marks the beginning of Advent, the waiting period. I never remember observing Advent in my Pentecostal church. My cousin Jennifer did have an Advent calendar, where day had a box to open with a unique picture. Something about checking off a box on a calendar...

clicking through the days.

The story of our life, right?

We live for Friday evening (unless we work on the weekend).

Waiting for life to happen...

That's what Advent is. A waiting for life to happen period...

Life in the form of the way to an abundant life... The Way...

Waiting for Jesus.

This first week of Advent focuses on that anticipation of waiting; not the negative, will it ever come to an end, but the positive- hope.

Hope.

So much packed into those four letters.

Christmas is about the gift of hope to the hopeless.

It's about the arrival of hope to a nation, and then extended to the world.

Hope for our life here... but also hope that there is something else. Something more. Something meaningful.

And just like little kids who anxiously pen their letters to Santa and gaze into the sparkling Christmas lights, hope shines bright in us.

Until that light is distinguished, because life has a way of knocking the hope right out of you.

The bills add up. You mess up at work. You yell at your kids. The mistakes, the shame, the doubt, it builds up...

until it smothers out the hope.

You start believing there isn't hope for anything better. You've asked yourself "Is there more than life to this", hoping it's true, but you've been so stagnant that you can't see how anything could ever be any different.

I've been there.

It's a familiar place.

And in that pit, it's hard to see the light of hope there...

but He came, a light in the darkness, so that hope will not be deferred.

Sometimes, it's in the waiting that we discover the true beauty of the moment.

Christmas gives us the opportunity to focus on that hope. As kids, we dreamed of a doll or a train or a bike...

but as adults, we are dreaming of love, peace, joy...

dreaming of the better life.

And we can have it, because He came to dwell among us, to give us joy and ensure we could live the abundant life.

We just have to keep looking for Him.

Keep clinging to that hope.

Christmas time's a'coming...