It’s the first week of Advent, a season of preparation.
I forget sometimes that the new year of the Church comes quietly. It begins with the silent growth of a baby in a teenager’s belly, a deep oasis in the desert beginning to well up towards the surface. I forget, because deserts are lonely places, and when you’re in one it’s easy to forget that the story of Jesus didn’t begin on the night choirs of angels announced his entrance to the world.
This letter is for you, if you’re in a place where God feels distant. If you feel like the Lord has abandoned you, like your prayers are going nowhere, like if one more person asks you how you’re doing you will straight up punch them.
Advent is for the likes of you, someone waiting for their faith to feel alive again. The Word is still half-formed flesh in the womb, just a promise and a faceless hope. We are still, and wait for joy to enter the world.
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Two and a half years ago, I left on a mission trip and lost my faith along the way. The God of my childhood, the one that knew all the answers and listened to all my prayers, slipped out the back door.
It felt like Lent came early. The words of my faith tasted like ashes and felt like sand in my mouth. It felt like I had wandered into a desert on accident, taken a wrong turn at a crossroads and ended up somewhere where no one, not even Jesus, would think to look for me. And, try as I might, the season didn’t change.
This sort of thing is called the dark night of the soul, and its supposed to be a good thing- in the absence of an emotional connection with God, an even deeper one is being forged. As silence falls, the Lord begins to work deep below the surface in an effort to make someone ever more new.
It doesn’t feel like a good thing, though. It sucks. The dark night sucks, and it hurts. My sophomore year of college was one of the hardest years of my (short) life, because it felt like one long season of ashes without the joy of Easter. I didn’t understand what was happening, what the Lord was doing, or why everything hurt so damn much.
The desert was long, and the nights were dark, and the stars seemed barely bright enough.
But to you, fellow wanderers of the desert: it ends. You will not remain there, just as the Israelites did not.
Because the season that the Lord has called you to is not just the preparation of Lent, but the stillness of Advent. The silence and stillness required to start a new work, bring about a new birth.
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Wandering in the desert often feels like it can be waiting on joy, the absence of it is so deeply felt. But that’s missing the point.
When my long dark night ended, at training camp only a few months ago, I felt joy. But I also felt something so much richer, so much deeper, and that is freedom.
The Advent season is a season of waiting, not just on joy, but on new birth- and birth means freedom. Of course it’s painful, blinking in the light of a brand new world after the struggle to grow. But it’s worth it.
