A note to readers: This is part one of a four-part, Advent-themed column series from Katie Neustaeter.
It’s upon us; like every other year, the season of hope, love, joy and peace is suddenly here. The time when things become a little brighter as the nights become a little darker, when people sing louder, smile more often, and choose to be a bit more generous, but the reality is also that many people feel like their world is going dark while the rest of the world is lighting up.
Last year I wrote a column about how it’s OK not to be OK at Christmas and it resonated with people more deeply than I had anticipated. I wrote it because I was not OK at Christmas and I wondered if maybe other people were feeling the same way — it turned out that a lot of people were.
I can’t help but think that there are a lot of people who are not OK as we enter the Christmas season again this year.
The world feels pretty heavy right now.
In Kamloops, our community was recently rocked after four students of Thompson Rivers University and a faculty member were killed in three separate vehicle-related accidents.
In our province, families are experiencing rapid job loss and fear they will not be able to put food on the table or presents under the tree.
In our country, many of us are still dazed by the vitriolic polarization of the recent federal election and are anxious about what comes next.
In our world, children are walking long, war-torn roads to promise lands that don’t want to share their milk and honey, and every day, the people we pass on the street are experiencing private pain that no one else knows about.
So what can make us stop, even in our legitimate heartbreak and sorrow, to reflect on what we have in addition to what is lost? What can cause us to expose our wounded hearts to the possibility of a brighter tomorrow?
It’s hope, and it’s approaching; quietly and often unnoticed during this week every year, hope begins to present itself to every person who has eyes to see and ears to hear.
Hope. (via Shutterstock)Whether we recognize it in the madness of this season or not, it is hope that first begins to foreshadow what will come from this season of pregnant expectation, and we can choose to notice it coming. Each light you see, each gift you wrap, and each carol you sing is a reminder that hope is casting its arms a little wider and beckoning us to draw near.
Hope isn’t some ethereal emotion manufactured for children's stories but unachievable for you and me; hope is a choice available to everyone at any time as long as we have breath. It’s a brave, tangible, palpable experience that can take a life of chaos and bring it back to order.
Hope is the first step in redeeming the broken things in our lives, finding purpose in the pain, and laying down our heavy burdens — and in a few weeks, we will find its source swaddled and lying in a manger; the Hope of this weary world.
Every day we unconsciously recognize it with our calendars, our time and how we mark the passing of our lives. But over the next four weeks of Advent, billions of people around the world will stop to intentionally acknowledge the qualities that lead to the day when time broke and was divided forever because of who was lying in that manger. The day when we began to mark history and hinge together what was and what had never been before; B.C. and A.D. We anticipate how the unfolding of human history was refracted, and hope led the way to a barn, in the dirt, on the ground where Mary knelt and donkeys brayed over tiny hands whose wounds would heal us, tender brow prepared for thorns, tiny heart whose blood would save us, for unto us a child was born.
And who was the child asleep in the hay?
We’ll have to wait and see; but from here, He looks a lot like hope.
None of us escape pain in this life and, at some point, we will all find ourselves wondering how we can possibly keep going forward, but regardless of the trials of our pasts, and in spite of the uncertainty of our futures; if we are alive then, there is hope today!
Maybe you can’t leap into it yet, maybe you can only take one single step, that’s fine! Hope doesn’t mind if you take your time, it’s patient; it’ll wait for you.
Even if it’s with teeny, tiny baby steps, use this season as an opportunity to choose hope; for it precedes all that is to come: love, joy and peace.
And then sit back and see what happens next.
Katie Neustaeter is a professional writer with a background in broadcasting and owner of Refraction Communications. Katie is also a multiple Kamloops Readers Choice award winner in categories including Influencer, Volunteer and Personality. She also really loves candy. As a community advocate who is passionately engaged in her region, Katie explores a wide range of topics in her column Refraction with the purpose of promoting healthy public discourse.
