Waiting in the Dark

The Latecomer's Guide to Advent: Week 2

Photo by Rahul via pexels.com

From June 2022 to August 2024, we were nowhere.

We weren’t evangelical anymore. That door had closed behind us after years of theological disillusionment, but we also weren’t...anything else yet. We didn’t attend church regularly. Some Sundays we’d visit a church that people said we should try. Other Sundays we stayed home and made pancakes and called it Sabbath.

We told ourselves we were healing. We told ourselves we needed space to figure out where we wanted to raise our kids, what kind of faith community we wanted them to grow up in. We told ourselves this was intentional, this season of being unchurched. But honestly? Mostly it just felt like floating. Like being suspended between two worlds, no longer belonging to the one we’d left, not yet home in whatever came next.

For someone who spent his entire adult life in ministry, being church-less felt like walking around without skin. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t a pastor in a congregation. I didn’t know how to structure my weeks without services and meetings and the rhythmic pull of church life. The freedom was disorienting.

The Scandal of Mary’s Waiting

Mary waited nine months.

Nine months of carrying God incarnate in her teenage body while her community whispered about her disgrace. Nine months of physical transformation she couldn’t control or speed up. Nine months of not knowing exactly how this would end, just knowing she’d said yes to something that would change everything.

Scripture doesn’t tell us much about those nine months. We get the Magnificat, that wild song of revolution she sang to Elizabeth. We get the image of her traveling while heavily pregnant because the Roman Empire demanded a census at the worst possible time. We get her giving birth in a stable because there was no room anywhere else. But we don’t get much about the middle part. The waiting part. The part where nothing visible was happening yet, but everything was happening under the surface.

That’s Advent. The season that asks us to sit in the discomfort of the not-yet. The season that refuses to let us skip ahead to the manger scene and the angels and the resolution. Advent says no, first you have to wait in the dark for a while. First you have to learn that transformation doesn’t happen on your timeline.

Most evangelical churches I grew up in couldn’t tolerate that kind of waiting. We wanted immediate conversions, instant sanctification, before-and-after testimonies that tied everything up neatly. We wanted people to get saved and then immediately get busy serving. We had no theology for dormant seasons, for the unproductive middle, for the holy work that happens when nothing visible is happening at all.

Gestation and the Dark

There’s a reason Jesus’s arrival is tied to winter solstice timing, even if we don’t know his actual birthdate. December in the northern hemisphere is dark. The light is dying. The days are short and cold. Ancient people watched the sun retreat and wondered if it would come back. They lit fires and waited. They marked the longest night and held vigil until the light began its slow return.

Advent invites us into that darkness. Not as punishment, but as necessity. Seeds germinate in the dark. Babies grow in the dark. New life requires a season of hiddenness before it can be born. Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic who understood darkness better than most, wrote about how God’s work often happens in what she called “the time of waiting,” when we can’t see or feel or understand what’s being made in us, but something is being made nonetheless.

Those two years we spent floating between churches weren’t wasted time. I couldn’t see it then, but we were healing in that darkness. We were letting old wounds close. We were learning that our faith didn’t depend on a building or a denomination or even a regular worship service. We were discovering what remained when we stripped away all the performance and programming and pressure.

We were gestating something new.

The Already-But-Not-Yet

There is a phrase I love: the already-but-not-yet. It comes from kingdom theology, this idea that Jesus inaugurated God’s kingdom when he showed up, but it hasn’t fully arrived yet. We live in the tension between what has been promised and what has been delivered. The Messiah came. But the world is still broken. The light entered the darkness. But the darkness hasn’t been eliminated.

That’s where most of us live, especially those of us who’ve left evangelicalism. We know something new is possible. We’ve caught glimpses of it, a theology that doesn’t weaponize Scripture, a community that makes space for doubt, a Jesus who actually looks like the one in the Gospels. But we’re not there yet. We’re still healing. Still figuring out what we believe now that we don’t believe what we used to. Still learning how to pray without the prescribed formulas. Still wondering if we’ll ever feel at home in church again.

Advent says that’s okay. Advent says the waiting is part of it. The darkness is part of it. The tension of living between promise and fulfillment is part of it. Mary didn’t skip ahead to the manger. She had to live through nine months of uncertainty first. The incarnation required gestation.

Permission to Still Be in the Middle

If you’re reading this and you’re still in the messy middle, you’ve left evangelicalism but you haven’t landed anywhere else yet, you believe in Jesus but you’re not sure what that means anymore, you want community but every church option feels wrong or insufficient, you’re not failing. You’re waiting. You’re letting something new form in the darkness where you can’t see it yet.

Don’t let anyone rush you. Not well-meaning family members who worry about your kids growing up without church. Not former church friends who think you just need to find the “right” congregation. Not even the voice in your head that says you should have figured this out by now, that healthy people don’t take two years to heal, that real faith doesn’t require this much uncertainty.

Advent gives you permission to wait. To not know yet. To live in the questions without scrambling for answers. To trust that something is forming even when you can’t feel it. The light is coming. It’s on its way. But first, we sit together in the dark and learn what can only be learned in the waiting.

We finally landed in August 2024. We found a church that feels like home, a community where our questions are welcome and our kids can grow up seeing faith as spacious rather than suffocating. But I don’t regret those two years of floating. I needed them. We needed them.

The winter solstice happens on December 21st this year. The longest night. After that, the light begins its slow return. But you have to go through the darkness first. You have to wait for the turning. You have to trust that the sun hasn’t abandoned you, it’s just doing the slow work that happens below the surface before anything can bloom.

Mary knew. She waited nine months in the dark, carrying a promise she couldn’t yet see. And when the time was right, not when she was comfortable, not when it was convenient, but when the fullness of time had come, the light entered the world through her body.

Your darkness is not empty. Something holy is forming there.

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