In the process of moving and reorganizing some bookshelves in the middle of October, I recovered something long out of place. Carved out of olive wood, a small nativity had been left behind from last year’s Christmas. I held it in my hand and cringed at the thought of digging through boxes in the garage long buried by post-Christmas storage. At this point, it seemed better to be two months early in setting it up than ten months late in packing it away.

Strangely enough, my decision then coincided with a friend’s mentioning of a good Christmas quote. Advent was suddenly all around me in October. In a Christmas sermon given December 2, 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manger. God comes. The Lord Jesus comes. Christmas comes. Christians rejoice!” To be early with my Nativity scene suddenly seemed a wise, but convicting thought. I had kept it around for the sake of convenience, what about for the sake of waiting? If Advent reminds us that we are waiting in December, what reminds us that we are waiting in October or February or July?

The story of the Nativity, though beautiful and familiar, and admittedly far-reaching, is as easily put out of our minds as Christmas decorations are put in boxes. On certain sides of the calendar, a nativity scene looks amiss. Sitting on my mantle in the fall or the spring, it seems somehow away from home, far from lights and greenery, longing for Christmas fanfare. But looking at it with thoughts of Advent near, I am struck by the irony that longing is often precisely the sentiment I am holding amidst the burgeoning lights, greens, and fanfare of Christmas.

As Bonhoeffer continues, “When once again Christmas comes and we hear the familiar carols and sing the Christmas hymns, something happens to us… The hardest heart is softened. We recall our own childhood. We feel again how we then felt, especially if we were separated from a mother. A kind of homesickness comes over us for past times, distant places, and yes, a blessed longing for a world without violence or hardness of heart. But there is something more—a longing for the safe lodging of the everlasting Father.”(1)

Unlike any other month, December weighs on my soul the gift and the difficulty of waiting. In the cold and dead of winter, tragedies seem to sting further, healing for the broken parts of my life and for the people I love seems harder to reach. When it comes to things that are deep and important, peace and goodness on the earth, freedom from suffering, waiting is hard, even painful. But in these moments, I am remembering that I am troubled in soul and looking for something greater. In the familiar hymns that play wherever I go, I remember that I am poor and imperfect and waiting for the God who comes down to us, and I hear again the gentle promise of a knock at the door. Like the Nativity scene on my mantle in June or October, I embody a strange hope in this sense of waiting. I see a home with tears and sorrow, but I also see in this home the signs of a day when tears will be wiped dry. Advent is about waiting for the one who embraced sorrow and body to show us the fullness of being home, present, and real. It is not December that awakens us to the reality that we are longing for things to be set right, for the world to be made new, for God to come nearer, but life itself juxtaposed beside the Nativity of God, the Incarnation of Christ. For each day is touched by the promise that in this very place Jesus has already done so, and that he will again come breaking through, into our world, into our longing, into our sin and deaths.

Every day, despite its location on the calendar, or the headlines on the news, a still, small voice answers our cry persuasively here and now, “Behold. I stand at the door and knock.”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Edwin Robertson, Ed., Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).

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