Advent is the season of waiting.  It is about looking with anticipation for the coming of Christ.  Primarily, that means His second coming before the Last Day.  But it is also useful to exercise our patience as we await His “coming” at Christmas.  We are not good at waiting.  We want to get what we want when we want it.

One of the great steps all of us take as we approach adulthood is developing a tolerance for deferred gratification.  That is the art of waiting to get something because there are other things that are more important.  I remember being taught that lesson by my parents as they introduced me to the skills of financial management.  I had to save my small allowance and whatever money gifts came my way until I had saved enough to buy whatever it was that had caught my eye.  The waiting was excruciating.  Nickels and dimes don’t stack up fast enough for a pre-teen.  I remember that for one especially expensive item I had to save for over a year.  It was a hard lesson, but it was perhaps the most important lesson of my life.  Once I had learned to make many small sacrifices for big things, then came getting a savings account and deferred gratification became a tool for prosperity.

Modern American society despises the discipline of deferred gratification.  Today, rather than putting off getting what we want by saving for it, we get what we want now and make many small sacrifices in the future for the privilege.  We call that credit.  We buy what we want on credit and pay more for it over time.  It used to be that out of control credit would land people in Debtor’s Prison or in a state of Indentured Servitude.  Now we simply sell ourselves into slavery to Ford Motor Credit or Mastercard Services.

Advent, properly observed, offers us the key to escaping our shackles.  As we prepare for Christmas, we can gradually get ourselves ready for the joy of Christmas.  We can make our preparations in stages.  Put up the tree in one week, and decorate it of the next or succeeding weeks.  We used to make the gifts we gave by hand.  That took time, and it is one of the great joys of life that we receive gifts that are important because they were made by love.  That horrid Christmas sweater should never be considered horrid, because “Aunt Bessie” sweated and literally bled to produce it as a labor of love.  The wooden toys that came out of Uncle Bill’s workshop used to become keepsakes.  Maybe I’m old fashioned but I see the value in the old ways.  I believe that God does too.

Family traditions can help us to mark the time waiting for Christmas in meaningful ways.  And that is helpful.  Because what we are really waiting for is not Christmas, it is the Second Coming.  You and I are on a journey to get ready to be citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven.  I can promise you, that none of us are ready for that right now.  But we should be striving toward spiritual growth so that when He comes again we will be “ready to join Him in the air”. 

Let us pray that during Advent we can see for ourselves what we must do to prepare ourselves so that when He comes again we will be found to be worthy of praise.  So, the person who asked the question for this week probably wanted a list of things to do to make Advent meaningful.  And that is not a bad thing.  But simply following a list is not the best way.  Part of our preparation is about examining ourselves to see how we fall short of being “worthy servants” and then making a plan for gradual improvement.  There is no To Do list that will fit everybody and simply providing a To Do list for everyone to follow skips that crucial first step of asking the question; What must I do to make myself ready for God to receive me?