Today’s post comes from Savior member Christine Kindberg; she writes about how Advent connects to the longing we so often feel in many aspects of our lives.
Longing is one of the central themes of Advent—and, as it happens, something I was just talking about with my spiritual director.
Longing, anticipation, preparation. “Come, thou long expected Jesus… joy of every longing heart,” says the hymn. Israel longed for the Messiah to come; we Christians now long for Christ to come again and bring about the fullness of his Kingdom. We lean into the “already—not yet” of the Gospel.
As a 4 on the Enneagram, longing is a constitutionally familiar emotion for me. I usually experience it as an “if only…” melancholy, a fixation on what is just out of reach, a permanent posture of yearning for something I don’t have. I’m a single 31-year-old who longs to be married. I’m a writer who for years longed to have a book out in the world; now that my first novel is out, I long for it to be doing better, for it to open more doors for my second book and the ones after that. There’s a longing that is a restless hunger for more, always more, because whatever is out of reach is the thing that will prove that I am worthwhile. I have a hunch Advent is about a different kind of longing.
When I think about longing in the Bible, two verses come immediately to mind. One is Psalm 42:1, which the NLT renders, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God.”
When I read this a few weeks ago, I was struck by the thought that a deer’s longing for water is a survival instinct, a spur to action. A deer’s longing isn’t nostalgic melancholy or thoughts of “Wouldn’t it be nice if only…” If a deer is thirsty, it doesn’t sigh over its longing. It moves to seek out water.
In Advent we dwell on our longing for the Kingdom of God to come in its fullness. We long for the justice of the Kingdom, for the righting of wrongs, for the new heaven and the new earth. This longing isn’t futile, wishful thinking for something permanently out of reach. This thirst for the coming of the Kingdom should inspire action, like a deer on a mountainside turns its head toward a stream and picks out a path forward to quench its thirst.
In what might God be calling me to be active in my longing for his Kingdom this Advent?
The other verse that I think of in connection with longing is Psalm 130:6, “I long for the Lord more than sentries long for the dawn, yes, more than sentries long for the dawn.”
This longing is different: there’s nothing that a sentry can do to make the sun rise any sooner. Does that mean the longing is futile? Will the Lord be always beyond the horizon? The sentries cling to their faith that the dawn will come at some point…but meanwhile, there’s the night. Meanwhile, our world is full of injustice, cruelty, hate, mistrust, and division.
And yet, sentries on duty aren’t supposed to be waiting listlessly, sitting around “with their teeth in their mouth,” as my grandmother from Kentucky would say. The longing of a sentry isn’t wistfulness because of boredom. Sentries need to be active in their waiting: alert, scanning their surroundings with close attention even as they long for the safety of the dawn and release from their post.
What might God be calling me to pay more attention to this Advent?
If the sentries were to give up on the coming of the dawn, they wouldn’t be able to continue their mission. If a deer were to surrender to its thirst instead of moving toward the water it longs for, it would die. Maybe the longing of Advent is part of the survival instinct of the Christian life, to keep us from being too easily satisfied with small goods. Maybe the longing of Advent is a posture of yearning that points us in the right direction, seeking God’s presence among us—as it is, already here, and as it will come in greater fullness.
May this Advent season see us seeking more of God’s presence as we long for the fulfillment of his Kingdom and his justice. May the yearning of our hearts be awakened until we can only find rest in God.