Reader,
Do you remember how much fun Christmas was when you were a kid?
Sometime in November, Christmas lights appeared along the eaves of your neighbors’ homes. Your mom began playing the Christmas radio station when she took you to and from school. By the time December 1st rolled around, you could hardly contain yourself. Christmas was coming, with the promise of festivities and presents, and you had a whole month to bask in this season of cheer.
Now here’s another question: when’s the last time you felt that way about Christmas?
If you’re like many of us grown-ups, the Christmas season is anything but cheerful. It’s a season of stress. There are too many parties. Too many school events. Too many presents to buy and not enough money to spend on them. Not to mention that perennial problem of what to do when you receive a gift from someone who wasn’t on your list.
When December 26 finally arrives, you breathe a sigh of relief. Or maybe it’s just a sigh. Because you don’t actually feel relieved. Instead, you’re hit by a massive wave of FOMO. Where did Christmas go? you wonder. How did I miss it?
The magic of Christmas often eludes us because we don’t start by celebrating the preparatory season of Advent.
If you’re not familiar with the liturgical calendar, Advent is a four-week season that leads up to Christmas Day. Christians from many different denominations have celebrated it for centuries. Its name, taken from Latin, literally means “arrival” or “appearance.” That’s appropriate because, throughout this season, we are celebrating Christ’s incarnational arrival on earth.
What distinguishes Advent from Christmastide is its focus on anticipation. We’re not singing “Joy to the World” for four weeks in a row. Rather, we’re remembering how the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob anticipated a Savior for centuries. They looked forward to the day when the Son of Man would come and free humanity from their enslavement to sin. As we celebrate Advent today, we look back and remember these feelings of longing and their cries for deliverance.
However, we are looking forward too. Christ was born, died, and resurrected, but our world is far from perfect. Sin, pain, and death still permeate our lives. Creation still groans because our world is not the way it was meant to be. While Christ’s work is already finished, the new creation—one in which there will be no sin, no death, no tears—is still yet to be.
Advent is still a season of anticipation. We’re preparing ourselves for the Second Coming of Christ, that day when all will be made right, when the dead shall rise and be made whole again, when we shall come full-bodied into the glorious kingdom of Christ.
That's all to say: if you want to rediscover the magic of Christmas, download our new Advent + Christmastide program.
Over the course of five weeks, starting December 1st, you'll get a unique opportunity to explore this season of anticipation. You'll reflect on what it means to prepare for Christ’s arrival and open your heart to hear the prompting of the Spirit.
This journey is not for the faint of heart. Unlike the Christmas playlists that you’ll hear in coffee shops, grocery stores, and shopping malls, this program invites you to sit in moments of tension and discomfort. In moments of pain and darkness, even.
Why? Because we cannot truly appreciate the joy of Christ’s coming unless we first wrestle with the reality that required him to take on flesh and appear in our world. What’s more, we cannot hope for our lives to be transformed—to taste the goodness of God in the land of the living—unless we first sit with the things within us that need transformation. We’re not just preparing for the coming of Christ. We’re preparing the way in our own hearts.
That’s what makes this season a journey towards joy and fulfillment and magic far beyond anything that Walt Disney ever dreamed up. When you lean into the season of Advent, you’ll find yourself celebrating the most alive, embodied Christmas you’ve had since you were six years old.
You are loved.
I'm for you.
You've got this.
Jake