Around the world and across the centuries, Christ followers have taken the weeks leading up to Christmas as an opportunity to focus and prepare in a season we've come to call Advent. These four-ish weeks are a time waiting, longing, and looking forward to the coming hope that is found in the humble birth of Christ. Additionally, in many ways Advent runs counter to the hustle, materialism, and excess that the Christmas season has all to often become.

Often we avoid the places of our lives and our world that are broken and dark, but Advent invites us to enter in to these spaces, allowing them to teach us the spiritual discipline of waiting.

Waiting is not something most of us are good at, but when it comes to our faith it's actually an essential practice if we want to see God's movement in our world. "Be still and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10)

Waiting allows us to release control, recognize our problems, and tell the truth about our fears and mistakes.

Waiting teaches us to slow down and notice things we miss amidst all our endless activity.

Waiting opens our eyes to our reality in new ways.

In the season of Advent, as the hours of light grow dimmer and leaner, and the weather colder and darker, we recognize the darkness of our world and we long for the light of Christ to emerge once again. As we wait, we lean into our hope, and lean into our longing at the same time.

Henri Nouwen said that "Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting."

So what is it you are waiting and longing for? In what areas of our lives and our world are we in desperate need of the hope, peace, joy and love of Christ?

Instead of our typical avoidance of these longings, what if we allowed this season to lay them bare within our souls, and entered into our darkness with a sense of waiting and yearning for God?

"Waiting for God to act only seems like waiting for God to act. God is always acting because God is always loving the world and always giving birth to something. Waiting for God to act is actually waiting for your soul to become quiet enough and contemplative enough to discern what God is doing in the obscure and forgotten corners, far from the corridors of power or wherever you think the action is." - Brian Zahn

For the next few weeks at Oak Life, we'll take a moment at our Sunday gatherings to pause, recognize our darkness, and light candle, symbolizing our hope in the light that Christ brings.