Advent - More Than Christmas Season

After 24 hours we'll be in December, the season, the jolly season of Christmas. Few of my friends have started their "Awww, Its is Christmas season, yey" thing almost a month ago. But this Christmasyyy smell doesn't seem to passing by my nose even remotely. This year am having a hard time of putting myself in a usual Christmas mood. I've a lot to on my plate. NO Christmas related program is on my calendar.  Prats asked me to join our church's Christmas play 'The last Christmas', i didn't show up on the audition day. Am 100% sure am not gonna do any caroling either. Leaving my story aside here is what i'd like to share: what Glenn Packiam says about how  Advent can be more than Christmas season.

1. Focus on the Longing.It has been said that at the bottom of human personality is the fundamental question of what a person is living for. What do we set our hopes on? What, in an ultimate sense, are we waiting for? Advent puts us in touch with the pain in our lives. It helps us to give voice to the ache in our souls, the cry within us that says, "This is not right!" Many people find themselves hurting around "the holidays" because the pain of losing a loved one or the ache of loneliness is more pronounced. But a secularized "holiday season" does little to heal those aches because it cannot direct it toward a hope. But Advent tells us that the deep longing, the ache we have for the world to be set right, for pain to be fully healed, for death to be defeated must be given voice. More than that: it must be given an Object. Advent reminds us that the hope of the whole aching, broken world is Jesus Christ.

So, instead of avoiding the pain or the ache in your soul, let it point you toward Christ. Pray, as the saints do at the end of the Book of Revelation, "Even so, Come, Lord Jesus!" Children know the feeling of waiting for Christmas to open the present that is under the tree. So in a similar way, followers of Jesus can let Advent teach us to wait longingly for the day when all that God has "purchased" for us in Christ arrives in its fullness, when our inheritance-- of which we now have a "downpayment"-- is fully received.