The Burden of Advent

Did you get it right this year?

Advent, I mean. Did you do it right?

Did your perfectly clean house smell like gingerbread? Were all of your gifts purchased and wrapped before December began? Have you had angelic family devotions every night where your children gathered around the piano and sang Silent Night perfectly on key?

What is it about Advent that makes us want to do everything perfectly?

Today, my house is a gift packing and car packing disaster that smells like burned noodles because I was multitasking while cooking the supper for our church Christmas celebration and packing the car for our annual cross-country pilgrimage. 

I want to strike the right balance between focusing on Jesus as the Reason for the Season and providing my family a joyful, memorable day. You know that lying Advent mantra that plays in all moms’ minds: This will be the only Christmas that he has while he’s seven! It leads us into the temptation of buying the life sized stuffed giraffe and the amplified drum set, and then Jesus is cast aside in the interest of holiday memories and good cheer.

Perhaps it’s the annual picture of what we all look like spiritually: trying to earn God’s good favor by pell-mell good deeds as fast and furiously as we can. If I sent you a Christmas card of what my Advent season generally looks like, it would be a very different picture than the rosy smiling faces of my children that I took back in the summertime.

The burden of Advent is that we don’t have it all together and we cannot ever be good enough to earn our own relationship with God. This is what Advent is all about: you can’t do it all because God already did.

We can hand the burden over to Him in exchange for His: “For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.”

We can bask in the glow of His kenosis and incarnation: He “made Himself nothing… becoming obedient to the point of death.”

We can listen to His proclamation: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased.”

We can surrender our illusions of saving ourselves: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

There is only one way to do Advent correctly, and that’s by resting in Christ’s love enough that it fills you up and overflows to everyone nearby.

It may look hectic and frantic. It may look pell-mell. It may smell like burned noodles. But it will be the overflow of the perfect Christ in the manger of hay who poured Himself out for you to empower and embolden you to pour yourself out for others. 

Before opening our gifts this year, my son was memorizing 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 about the second Advent of Christ.

“Mom,” he said, “I should be listening for the trumpet of God more than for what is in my Christmas presents.”

And the burden of Advent was lifted by a little child.