Advent. This is my favorite season of the year, hands-down. I've always believed Christmas to be my favorite holiday, but I find that I love the weeks leading up to Christmas, and then Christmas Day itself is a bit of a bummer - sort of a, "Well, the fun's over now." As I've grown and learned more, I've discovered there are seasons in the traditional church calendar, like Lent (which I deliberately explored for the first time this year). I've discovered that what I love so much about Christmas is the anticipation. It's what may be best described as Advent.
The Christmas season has always enchanted me because of the way everything seems to feel at this time of year. The "warm fuzzies" were stronger in my younger days, and I've become ever so slightly less naive about the world as I've gotten older, but somehow, the magic and goodness of the season is still very real to me. I don't see myself ever growing jaded about all that. As I've been thinking through what this magic and goodness could be for now, now that I've stepped into adulthood and am letting go of some childlike (or childish?) innocence, I keep coming back to one thought concept. I celebrate Christmas to personally acknowledge the birth of Jesus thousands of years ago. This birth was not just a birth of a will-someday-be-great-man. This wasn't even merely the birth of the Son of God. This birth was God coming for me - for us. That's the thought concept to which I always gravitate back when I pray and thank God for the joy celebrating the season gives me, for the amazing story recounted by it all. As I talk with God and exhaust all my flowery language, letting it fall away to be replaced with the simplest and most honest of words to Him, generally, all I end up saying and thinking and feeling is, "Thank you for coming for me." Over and over again. Not just sending your Son or some proxy. No... if the Father, the Son, and the Spirit truly are one in some cosmically bizarre, unintelligible-to-the-human-mind type of way, and if he became fully human and yet remained fully God in a similarly incomprehensible manner, then he came for me. Not only that, but I think he did something drastic to himself in this process. In becoming human, the Father/Son/Spirit oneness remained, but it was not the same. I think Jesus' suffering began not at his arrest at the age of 33, or even in the garden beforehand as he sweat blood in desperate prayer, but when he stepped into the human realm. When he came for me. He came for me. Unreal.
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