Theme for December: Advent – the Coming

I can’t believe it, it is the Christmas season and I have actually completed 48 going on 49 Bible journaling pages based on my relationship with Jesus. He gave me each month’s theme a year ago and I have spent each month hearing and learning from Him through His word.
So I introduce December with a section of Ann Voskamp’s introduction to “The Greatest Gift.”  May we finish the last few journaling weeks stronger, closer and more in love with our God.

Big and glossy and loud and fast —that’s how this bent-up world turns. 

But God, when He comes —He shows up in this fetal ball. He who carved the edges of the cosmos curved Himself into a fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light splitting all white. 

He gave up the heavens that were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand. The mystery so large becomes the Baby so small, and infinite God becomes infant. The Giver becomes the Gift, this quiet offering.

This heart beating in the chest cavity of a held child, a thrumming heart beating hope, beating change, beating love, beating the singular song you’ve been waiting for —that the whole dizzy planet’s been spinning round waiting for. 

Waiting. 

Advent. 

It comes from the Latin. It means “coming.”
This, this, is the love story that’s been coming for you since the beginning. 

It is possible for you to miss it. To brush past it, to rush through it, to not see how it comes for you up over the edges of everything, quiet and unassuming and miraculous —how every page of the Word has been writing it, reaching for you, coming for you. And you could wake on Christmas only to grasp that you never took the whole of the Gift, the wide expanse of grace. 

So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. 

Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait.
Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved. For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out. For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas. 

Sometimes the heart waiting for the Gift . . . is the art of the Gift. 

This waiting, your art —mark it. 

Mark Advent with a counting, a way of staying awake and not missing.
-Ann Voskamp, “The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas”

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