Advent is for Broken Hearts

I love preparing for the Advent season each year. When I talk with friends about our traditions, I’m sure they visualize my family gathered serenely around a wreath of candles, quietly absorbing the weight of the incarnation with our children, sipping hot cider and talking about how much we love this time of year.

That’s not the image I mean to project, though. It’s not that Advent is never that way in my household. It’s that when I remember the Advent celebrations of my family’s past, I remember a lot of tears.

Advent is a look back and a look forward—an exercise of remembering Jesus’ first coming and setting our hearts on His next one. We are so shackled to the daily minutia of soccer practice, homework, laundry, work deadlines, bills, meal prep, and general busyness that it becomes nearly necessary to set aside twenty-five days in December to take a long pause and remember who we belong to and why we belong to Him.

It’s a time to re-calibrate our desires, to see more clearly what our life should be about, to remember that our redemption was made possible through the death and resurrection of the baby in the manger. Advent is a long sabbath for the weary, hurried, unfocused soul.

But Advent is for broken hearts, too.

There’s a reason people talk about the holidays being hard. Suffering doesn’t seem to follow the calendar or save itself for a less busy or less emotionally charged time of the year. Trials aren’t respecters of our schedules, and at some point, we’ll all likely find ourselves walking through the holiday season in a fog of grief or brokenness.

Four years ago, my family lived through just such a grievous Christmas. My grandmother was dying of Alzheimer’s and I had recently been diagnosed with a chronic pain disease. Alongside all these health struggles, we were also in the midst of an adoption train wreck that kept us guessing each day whether or not we would be able to keep our new son.

I remember feeling perpetually afraid as we approached December. I was fearful that this first Christmas with our youngest child would also be our last one with him. Our extended family didn’t know what to do that Christmas—buy him presents? Include him in the family photos? Pretend like he’s a visitor in case it doesn’t work out? When my grandmother’s prognosis and my precarious health were added to the equation, I wondered if it would have been safer to just skip the holidays all together.

But then December 1^st rolled around, and we fell into the rhythm of Advent as we always have. We lit the first candle, read our first Scripture passage, prayed, sang, and remembered the point of Jesus’ coming in the first place. We did it again the next night, and again the night after that.

Continue reading this post at Women Encouraged.