Waiting Changes Everything

As we begin Advent, our family is waiting for the birth of our 4th grandchild.  She (we know it’s a girl) was due on Thanksgiving.  Consequently, Thanksgiving was a last minute affair for us.  We didn’t get a turkey or any of the dinner fixings until the day before.  Who knew where we were going to be?  

As it was, we ate Thanksgiving dinner on the edge of our seats, expecting the phone to ring at any moment.  

Waiting changes everything.  Even more when you’re waiting for a baby.  Waiting for a baby to be born is a unique experience, one part inevitable and one part impossible.  

That she will be born is a given.  The enormity of that is impossible to really comprehend.  The way that lives will shift to make room.  The way the entire world expands just a bit, the way that reality now takes one more life into account.  

The parallels spill obviously into Advent.  That Christmas will come is inevitable.  Our whole Black Friday world is banking on it.  But within that is still the enormity of the impossible, even 2000 years later.  Of lives shifting, hearts expanding, the calculus of every reality taking the miraculous and wonderful into account.  

Emmanuel.  God with us.  Over and again in every inevitable and impossible thing about to be born.