Ruth Greenaway-Robbins

An Advent Sunday Reflection

On the eve of Advent Sunday – our “New Year’s Eve” in the Church – I often find myself in a place of deep gratitude for the year that has been, pondering the things that have been painful or challenging, reflecting quietly, and also with a growing excitement for the year that is coming. Tonight in our home in north London, the first of our seasonal decorations is up: a simple wooden tree made from driftwood. Wood washed and worn by the ocean now stands in our living room, warmed by soft lights.

We’re big into hygge as a family – a Scandinavian practice of warm light, and a cosy home as the winter draws in. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been pulling out the cosiest blankets, adding warm lamps, and inviting a sense of comfort and gentleness into the house. While the world outside grows colder and the trees become dormant, we are choosing warm light – but also choosing to welcome the darkness. Darkness as a place to ponder, to give thanks, to process the year, and to make space in head and heart so that, come spring, new ideas and new energy can take root.

And tonight, the gentle glow of those lights settles on the driftwood tree that will help us mark first Advent and later Christmas. It strikes me how fitting this is: the Light we will soon welcome at Christmas is the same Light who will one day encounter the wood of another tree – the cross.

But for now, in this season of beginnings, Jesus’ words call us simply to watch and wait. To be ready. Not with frantic activity or perfectly polished plans, but with an open, spacious attentiveness.

December seems to invite us to speed up, to fill our calendars, our tables, our shopping baskets. Yet creation itself, God’s first testimony, whispers a different invitation: to rest, to become dormant for a little while, to make room, to quieten our spirits enough to notice the first flicker of approaching light.

In her book Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey writes of rest as a quiet, holy act of rebellion, a refusal to believe that our worth is tied to our productivity or our pace. She speaks of rest as a way of reclaiming our humanity, of remembering that we are not machines but beloved creatures. And I can’t help thinking how profoundly Advent echoes that call. At the very moment the world urges us to do more, buy more, be more, Advent invites us to step out of that rhythm and into God’s own slower, deeper rhythm of watching and waiting. To resist the myth that busyness is blessing, and instead to wonder, to listen, to let ourselves be renewed by stillness.

So I find myself wondering:

What might watching and waiting look like for us this Advent?

What might it mean to make room, not just in our homes, but in our inner life – for the Light of the World to come?

As Isaiah envisioned the nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord, walking in His ways and learning the pathways of peace, so Advent invites us to walk in the light of the Lord even before the fullness of the dawn arrives.

May this be a season of gentle light, spacious rest, and hopeful waiting – a season where, quietly and almost imperceptibly, the Light draws near, and where like our little driftwood tree – shaped by waters, lit by warmth – we too can become simple signs of the greater Light that is coming, and the new year that begins in hope.

God of gentle light,
in this season of waiting,
quiet our hearts,
slow our steps,
and teach us the holy resistance of rest.
May your light find us attentive and unhurried,
ready to welcome the One who comes.
Amen.