Advent: Waiting Means No Control

The Advent season has finally arrived (I know, I know, I'm two Sundays late for the party already)!  This means we are in the liturgical season that reminds us that we should be living our lives waiting for the coming of our King.  We not only reflect on the mystery of the Incarnation (ie. Why the heck would God make Himself human and not only that, why He didn't just beam Himself down ready to go, but went the traditional route of being pushed out of a woman's va-jay-jay. I mean, it's mind boggling when I see how farty, poopie, and altogether dependent my own baby is - that's not God right?  God is supposed to be all muscles and Santa Clause...), but also the hard-to-imagine mystery of the second coming of Jesus.

These things are awesome and all, but my weak mind can only handle a few minutes at a time of contemplating these things before my head feels like its about to explode from the sheer brilliance and My-ways-are-not-your-ways-ness of it all.  To slow down the head-spinning, I try to bring it down to a personal level and ask myself, "What am I waiting to hear from God about?"

To prepare for this season in my life, I stepped back from most of my on the ground responsibilities in youth ministry in order to make space for my new daughter and being a new parent.  It was a wise decision, if I do say so myself, but it was really hard to relinquish a mode of ministry that I did straight for five years.  One of the hardest things was not being able to guide certain parts of the ministry like I was used to and feeling anxious about seeing certain parts slide back towards ways that I had tried to make better as if it was invalidating the work that I had done.  Obviously, that's not true at all and was a lesson in "it doesn't have to be done my way."  It was both liberating and terrifying when I realized one day that while it felt like that previous mode of ministry was just on pause waiting for me to return, the reality was that I would never be able to return to exactly the way it looked. Rebirth.

So it seems that in this Advent season, I am waiting in joyful hope for how God is calling my ministry to evolve.