The Latecomer's Guide to Advent

Week 1: Permission to Begin Again

Photo by Nicola Barts via pexels.com

I am rarely late for anything. This is not an exaggeration. If we need to leave at 7:00, I’m in the car at 6:52 tapping my foot. If church starts at 10:30, we’re walking through those doors at 10:18. Early is on time, on time is late, and late is... well, late is unthinkable.

My wife does not share this philosophy. When we first got married, her approach to time nearly sent me into cardiac arrest. We fought about it constantly. I’d be stress-sweating in the driver’s seat while she was still getting ready. I’d lecture her about respect and responsibility. She’d tell me to calm down, that five minutes wouldn’t kill anyone. Spoiler alert: it did not kill anyone. But it nearly killed our first year of marriage.

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of this dance: my obsession with punctuality isn’t really about respecting other people’s time. It’s about control. It’s about the deep, anxious belief that if I’m not managing the timeline, something will go wrong. That if I’m not there early, I’ll miss something important. That lateness equals failure, and failure equals worthlessness.

Which brings me to Advent. I’m late.

Starting Advent a Week Late

It’s December 9th. Advent technically started on December 1st. Most people with their liturgical calendars and their matching purple candles have been observing this holy season for over a week now. They’ve probably already lit two candles. They’re ahead of me, further along, more disciplined. They did it right.

And here I am, showing up late. Ugh. (You have no idea how much that bothers me)

But here’s the thing I’m slowly learning, both in my marriage and in my faith, God doesn’t actually care about my timeline. The obsessive need to be early, to get it right, to never miss a beat? That’s my anxiety talking, not the voice of the divine. The liturgical calendar exists to serve us, not to condemn us. Advent doesn’t slam its door shut if you show up on December 9th instead of December 1st.

Most of my childhood churches didn’t observe Advent at all. We went straight from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve services without any of this waiting business. I didn’t even know what the Advent wreath meant until I was well into my twenties. So maybe I’m not late, maybe I’m right on time for whenever I was ready to discover this gift.

God’s Inconvenient Timing

The people of Israel waited for the Messiah. Not for a few weeks or even a few years. They waited for centuries. Four hundred years passed between the last words of the prophet Malachi and the moment an angel showed up to a teenage girl in Nazareth. Four hundred years of silence. Four hundred years of wondering if God had forgotten them, if the promises had expired, if maybe they’d missed their moment somehow.

Then Jesus showed up in the absolute worst timing imaginable. Born to an unwed teenager in an occupied territory during a census that forced poor families to travel for bureaucratic nonsense. Born in a stable because there was no room anywhere else. Born when most people had long since given up on watching for God to show up.

Scripture calls this “the fullness of time” in Galatians 4:4. When the time had fully come, God sent his Son. Not when it was convenient. Not when the people of God had their liturgical calendars perfectly organized. Not when they were ready. But when the time was right according to a timeline that had nothing to do with human preparation or worthiness.

The Greek distinguishes between two kinds of time. Chronos is clock time, measured and managed and controlled. It’s the time I was obsessing over in my car at 6:52. But kairos is something else entirely, it’s the right time, the opportune moment, the fullness that can’t be rushed or scheduled. God works in kairos time. We panic in chronos time.

Permission to Begin Again

I’m learning to extend to myself what my wife graciously extended to me in those early years of marriage: permission to be human. Permission to let go of the illusion of control. Permission to show up when I show up, not when some arbitrary standard says I should.

If you’re reading this and you feel late to Advent, late to liturgy, late to thoughtful Christianity, late to deconstruction, late to your own spiritual life, you’re not. You’re exactly on time for your story. The waiting is part of it. The feeling of being behind is part of it. The anxiety that you’ve already missed something crucial is part of it.

Advent invites us into waiting. It asks us to sit in the tension of the not-yet without scrambling to get ahead of it. Mary waited nine months carrying the incarnation of God in her teenage body. The shepherds had waited their whole lives on the night shift before angels showed up. The magi traveled for months following a star they didn’t fully understand. Nobody in the Christmas story was early. They all showed up exactly when they were meant to.

So light your first Advent candle today if you want. Or don’t. Start this week or start next week. Read the passages or don’t read the passages. God isn’t checking attendance. The point isn’t perfect liturgical observance. The point is making space for the God who shows up on divine time, not ours.

My wife still takes longer to get ready than I’d prefer. I’m still usually early to things. But I’m learning that love means releasing my grip on the timeline. That trust means accepting that some of the best moments happen when you’re not frantically trying to control when they occur.

Maybe that’s what Advent is really about. Not counting down the days until we get Christmas right. But learning to wait in the tension, to trust the timing we can’t control, and to believe that God is still on the way, even when we feel hopelessly behind.

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