Faith, Love, and Advent

Something I've been thinking on this past month has been about faith and Advent.  Advent, the season in which we wait for the coming of Jesus, also happening to occur in the same few weeks when waiting to go home has been the hardest.  This kind of hit home for me...that in those moments when I felt impossibly and infinity far away from everyone and everything that I loved and loved me, this was symbolic of the impossible infinity between God and his people before Christ came.  That there was a giant chasm between the love of God and his people.  But even that chasm could be crossed.  God's people waited and waited and waited for the Messiah, and then he came in the form of a child.  That child took our pain and sorrow and sin, and died for it, closing the infinite gap between God and man.  This semester there were times when I knew my family and friends loved me back at home, but I couldn't feel it. They all just seemed to every far away.  Infinite and Impossible.  But I waited and waited and waited.  And in the time with the birth of Christ, I also will be reunited with my family and loved ones, just as the birth of Jesus reunited God with his people.

So this Christmas is especially poignant for me.  In a way, I understand the profundity of Advent and Christmas even more than before, because I know the feeling of being so very far away fro my family, the patience it has required, and the faith I needed.  Somedays I needed to hang on solely to the faith that the semester would reach an end, and I would see my Mom and Dad and brother and home yet again.  I clung to that faith like a lifeline.  And thats the meaning of faith, isn't it?  "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen."  Its believing in that scrap of hope even when everything around you says otherwise.  And sometimes it doesn't have to be logical.  But its one of the strongest things in this world, carrying you through the storms of life.  I know that faith in my family, and their love, got me through the harder times here abroad.  But it was my faith in God that carried me even further.  Now, with Christmas rapidly approaching, I have come appreciate even more what it meant 1) for the People of God to wait for the Messiah, 2) what it meant for God to be divided from his children, and 3) what it meant for Christ to leave the glories of heaven and the Father, to live among us and bridge the impossible gap.

So in this season of Advent where we await the coming of Christ, in the second coming, in our hearts, and in his birth, I give thanks.  Thanks for the love I've been shown by my family, thanks for the love of my God, because he has been faithful to me.  Even when home seemed so far from me, I was comforted in the knowledge that I was never truly far from Him.  And now I only have a week left of waiting when I shall be reunited with my family.  And to some people that may not seem like a Christmas miracle, but it is.  Because I know that I could not have come this far, learned so much, grown so much, without faith and His faithfulness to me.  And that really is what Advent and Christmas is about.  God's faithfulness, and ability to cross the impossible boundaries.  We are never really alone.  Never really lost.  Never really unloved.

...Rejoice, rejoice Emmanuel shall come to thee oh Israel...