Come Lord Jesus
{An Audio Advent Companion}
Come Lord Jesus, The Weight Of Waiting
Every Purchase of the Gift edition of Come, Lord Jesus, includes access to the Audio Advent Companion
Advent in the church, is a season of preparation rimmed with hopeful expectation. For 24 days before Christmas, we find ourselves waiting for Jesus to come. We busy ourselves with preparations–shopping, wrapping, baking, traveling, partying. Few of us manage to wait quietly. Instead, we fill our calendars with a steady stream of activity, perhaps in an attempt to distract ourselves from the stand-still feeling of the required waiting. Waiting is hard work for people who crave instant gratification. We want to see Jesus now.
“The waiting is not just an indolent ‘waiting around.’ We wait ‘for the morning,’ which is to say that we wait in hope.”
We’re not the first people who’ve lamented the seemingly slow gestation of the Holy. From the first exile out of the Garden of Eden people throughout the centuries have been waiting for their King to come. Come, Lord Jesus, they have prayed and during Advent we find ourselves uttering the same three words. O Come, O Come, Immanuel, we sing, weary from the waiting. Immanuel, the name Isaiah gives us for the coming King (Isaiah 7:14), means God with us. He has come, and is coming. One day, He will come again.
The Advent season provides us a beautiful, and sometimes difficult, opportunity to practice waiting. We won’t do it perfectly. There will likely be more tasks, more invitations, and more opportunities for distraction on our calendars than we can manage.
What if we took just the next few weeks to sit still just for a few moments, to let ourselves feel the weight of waiting? What if we slowed ourselves enough to whisper Come, Lord Jesus and then gave Him unhurried space to enter into us? How might the space and pace of waiting affect how we experience the unbridled joy of Christmas and the hope of Immanuel?