Faith Venture

Anticipation
Anticipation
Is making me late
Is keeping me waiting

Carly Simon

We have been told for at least a week that today a blizzard is coming. At 10:00 this morning the temperature will be 28 F; at dinner time it will be close to 0 F. When I get up tomorrow the temperature will be -11 F with 25 mph winds gusting to 50 mph. Forecasters initially predicted 10 inches of snow. Now it’s 3 inches. But it will be messy.

We have been living in anticipation of the blizzard for a week. I went to a store yesterday to purchase a present for a Christmas gift exchange. The place was packed. People stocking up on bread, milk, toilet paper, and the like.

Talk about layered anticipation. We are in the anticipation period of the Christian church calendar–Advent, the anticipation of God visiting Earth.

I wonder, which anticipation is more real?

If you don’t have small children with the anticipation of presents under the Christmas tree, can you still work up emotionally the sense of anticipation that was the atmosphere in the Mediterranean world 2,000 years ago? The sense of anticipation that the first couple of generations of Jesus-followers felt?

Or, maybe like Carly Simon sang, we are paralyzed into inaction in the anticipation not knowing which way things are going. (I could write a whole sermon on that topic, but I won’t. I’ll leave it to your own imagination.)

This entry was posted on December 22, 2022 at 6:34 am and is filed under advent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.