Advent: Entering With Presence
An Invitation into Presence
Social media is stressing me out. As soon as Thanksgiving passed, my feeds filled up with people telling me all the routines, inventories, check-ins, habit formation strategies, and goal-chasing hacks we have to implement to have the “best” or “most productive” year in 2026. The push to plan and prepare, to produce and perform, is already exhausting, and the New Year hasn’t even arrived yet. The draw of this, I believe, is coping. Coping with the lull, the quiet between things we hoped we would achieve or experience this year, and the reality we lived. Coping with the prayers that still feel unanswered, and the uncertainty that marks the world around us on a macro and a micro level. Our expectations, however loosely held throughout the rest of the year, somehow find their grip on our hearts as a seeming close approaches.
Advent is the sweetest gift and remedy for this.
The word “Advent” is derived from the Latin “Adventus,” which translates to arrival, entrance, or coming. This definition has stopped me in my tracks this year, painting a picture in my heart of a cosmic door swinging wide in the starlit sky, as the God of the Universe steps through and walks among us. Just as He once did in the Garden. What an entrance, a commotion, a break in time and space when absolutely everything changed. I also see an image of a simple crack, a fissure, a hairline fracture in concrete that seems small and inconsequential. But, in reality, the integrity of all that seems firm is shattered, and life begins to breathe through the cracks. Both images, together, illuminate the scope of how we experience and hold the arrival of Christ. Sometimes we see clearly the way everything has changed because He came, but just as often, we only catch sight of the flourishing that squeezes through the cracks of His coming.
Image by American Jael, accessed via: Unsplash
And that’s why Advent is a gift to a heart that wants to press on to the next, racking up goals and new habits that will fix everything. It is an opportunity to hold both wonder and awe, while breathing into hope for all that is not so, at the same time.
On wonder and awe, Advent invites us to slow down enough to notice, to notice the seismic change that Jesus’ entering in 2000 years ago brought to the world. In the prophetic poem of Isaiah 61, we see the promise of who Jesus would be and all He would do:
1 The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
3 and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
And in the life of Jesus, we see He did exactly that. In our own salvation stories, we see He did exactly what He said He would do.
On hope for all that is not so, this prophetic poem includes and is dependent on an acknowledgement of the dark. Jesus beholds the prisoner, the mourner, the despairing, the poor, seeing them/us in the fullness of all that sin and death have robbed of us. Jesus sees the brokenness of the world. Advent creates space for us to acknowledge the unfinished nature of our restoration, our need for Jesus’ Second and final Coming. It allows us to be honest about all that is not what we hoped. To lament the brokenness within and around us. To grieve the gap between the Kingdom and the present. Advent invites us to wait while reminding us that He has come before, giving us a knowing assurance even in the lingering dark.
So, this Advent, I would like to invite you to meet God’s presence with your presence. Resist the rush. Reject the hustle to 2026. Instead: Notice. Make space for wonder. Make space for grief. Make space for hope to breathe into your heart. Ask the meaning of all that has become commonplace. Behold the thrill of hope. Behold the light that breaks into the dark. The dark has not, cannot, and will not, overcome it.
I invite you to go joyspotting: pray for eyes that can see the good, the true, and the beautiful, in the cracks in the concrete and splayed across the sky. Pray that this Advent is one in which Jesus’ presence is familiar to you in the dark. Slow down and lean in, let the season be the blessing it is supposed to be to your weary soul.