Eager Anticipation

18-21 That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens. -Romans 8:19-21 MSG

Advent is about waiting in expectation... waiting in eager anticipation.  Do you know the feeling?  It is the 12-year-old waiting for summer vacation from school.  It is the young army wife waiting for her husband to come home from deployment.  It is falling in love and awaiting that first lover's kiss.  This kind of waiting is the kind of waiting that makes the desired thing feel so close and yet so far.  So close you can feel it, savor it, almost hold it in your hand; but so far that you have an aching yearning that won't leave you alone.  This is Advent.

We don't get that kind of Advent when we just think of it as waiting for Christmas... waiting for the Christ who came to us as a baby in a manger.  We have to get the "whole" of the waiting of He who Was and Is and Is To Come.

This first week of Advent typically focuses on "hope."  Hope is about what is yet to be and that yet to be is Jesus coming again.  Now is the time that the self-proclaimed prophets might raise their signs that say, "The end is near."  But our God... the God who BEGAN the world... the God who BEGAN new life in CHRIST... the GOD who BEGINS a new work in each of us... is a God of BEGINNINGS, not endings.

So I say to you that it is NOT the end that is near, but a beginning.  A beginning full of hope and dazzling wonders.  It is so close that we can feel it and savor it.  But just far enough that we continue to yearn for it with an aching longing.

We don't know exactly what this new beginning is all about.  But we do know that it is good.  Because God is good.  All the time.

Father,
We wait on tiptoe in eager anticipation of any new beginnings that you may have for us.  Open our hearts and fill us with hope.  Amen.