This Sunday, Advent begins. It’s the season that introduced me to the church calendar — and it’s a season that’s more precious to me with every passing year. The older I get, the more I realize that waiting and tension and longing are an inextricable part of being human. Honestly, sometimes meeting God in these places feels more honest than meeting Him in the joyful ones. This Advent season, I’m following along with Kate Bowler’s (free) devotional, aptly named A Season of Waiting. If you’re looking for a great resource this year, I highly recommend and trust Kate’s work. (Her latest book makes the perfect stocking stuffer, too.) I’ll start a Substack chat for us to discuss together as we go along, too! (More on this soon. 😉)
Today’s essay is from the paid subscriber vault, circa December of last year. As I reread it today, I was reminded of a few things I really needed to hear. Past you preaching to present you is a real experience, let me tell ya. I hope there are some words in here your heart needs, too. Welcome to the season of waiting, my friends. Let’s wait well together as we close out 2022.
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All month long, that still, small voice in my soul has been steadily prompting me to consider time. It seems like every area of my life is coming back to a conversation about rhythms, about waiting, about longing, about seasons being welcomed in or ushered out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how time would have felt to Jewish people in the days leading up to Jesus’s arrival. In the gap between the Old and New Testaments, God’s people were living in a culture rich with oral tradition and storytelling. Of course, the most important and significant historical events were captured on scrolls, but ink and papyrus or tablets were extravagant, reserved for the wealthy elites. For the rest of them — the ones like us — life was shared through story.
I mentioned the gap between the Old and New Testaments in passing, but it’s really the crux of the matter for me. That gap? It was 400 years long.
In the Old Testament, God’s people had been led by clouds and fire to their Promised Land. They were given a rhythm to follow — a calendar for fasting, feasting, repenting, and forgiving debt. They also had a string of priests, prophets, and kings to guide them over the centuries that followed. God spoke — to leaders like Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and Isaiah. And the people listened.
And then, one day, God didn’t speak. No more prophets. No more pillar of fire. And the silence continued for over 400 years.
And yet, when we turn the page to the New Testament, what do we find? A genealogy — proof that God had been working in every generation to bring Jesus into the world. A teen mother who received the first recorded prophesy in centuries… and actually believed it. And in that prophecy, the answer to the generational prayers of God’s people.
All of this tells me two things. And they both hit me like a ton of bricks this year.
First, Mary would never have believed that angel if she wasn’t familiar with the aforementioned, and now age-old, prophecies. That tells me that the stories of God’s faithfulness and the hope of His return were still running at full speed during Mary’s lifetime. Entire generations lived and died during “the silent years.” They never heard a new revelation or saw a new temple. They didn’t see the move of God they’d been hoping and praying for. And they still told the stories. They still held on to hope. That alone sends me to my knees in tears. How could I, after just two years of loss and longing, to give up on the promises of God? Give me the faith of the silent generations — the ones who never made it onto the pages of Scripture but upon whose backs our faith was carried.
And in light of that, I’m suddenly acutely aware that God wasn’t silent after all. All the way back in the Pentateuch, God gave His people a rhythm to follow — a calendar for fasting and feasting, a spiritual practice for daily living — and a string of prophets and kings to guide them. I’ve already mentioned that the first one went missing during these years. But the absence of prophecy doesn’t mean the silence of God.
If I could just preach for a minute, I’d say that our current evangelical culture has totally missed the embodied presence of God while we scan the horizon for fresh revelation. Does God speak in miraculous, sweeping ways? Absolutely, and we should listen when He does. But does He also speak through rhythms and practices, times and seasons? Yes, and I’m starting to believe He speaks in this way infinitely more often than the first.
Generations of Jewish people may not have had a new prophet or a promise fulfilled, but that fact wouldn’t have untethered them from their faith like it would many of us. They didn’t encounter God only in the revelatory moments. They encountered Him in their daily rhythms.
They remembered Him every time they laid a lamb on the altar. They mourned the world’s brokenness and longed for His return during their seasons of fasting. They celebrated His goodness as they cancelled debts during the Year of Jubilee. They pondered His teachings in the temple. They thanked Him for his miraculous rescue at Passover. They honored His ordained rhythm of rest every Sabbath day. They might not have received a new prophecy, but their conversations with God were rich, indeed. Silence? Far from it.
We were created for this kind of living. Every rhythm and season is chock-full of the presence of God. Just as He lovingly fashioned ocean tides and harvest times and lunar cycles, He designed us to experience Him through the rhythms of our everyday lives. Call it liturgy, call it spiritual practice, call it a rule of life, call it whatever you want — but call it good. Connecting to God through our embodied lives grounds us in a way that waiting for revelatory experiences never could.
Realizing this has changed me. I’d like to say, “I can’t wait to welcome God into my life’s rhythms next year.” But what’s even truer — I can’t wait to look more closely at my ordinary days in the year ahead and realize He’s always been there, waiting within them. This is what caused generations in “the silent years” to hold unwaveringly to hope. This is how I’ll hold onto hope, too.
SOIL TENDING
TO PONDER: What would it look like for you to view spiritual practice as a thing to actually build your faith on? If God was silent for the rest of your life, what would it look like to follow Him and find Him still?