Waiting for Christmas to finally arrive was so difficult as a child.  I remember waking early on Christmas morning to peek down the stairs to see if Santa had come.  The year I bounded down the stairs to find a new bicycle with training wheels beside our tree, I was ecstatic.  I have an old black and white photo of me still in my pj’s on that bike with a wide smile on my face.  What great memories!

I still enjoy Christmas but the waiting is different.  As a parent and especially for mom’s, there is so much preparation to get ready for Christmas.  All the decorating, baking, buying and wrapping gifts, and cleaning the house can be overwhelming.  But it’s all worth the wait to see the smiling faces of my family and friends when we gather together.  I think I like the laughter best when we reminisce about old times.  This is often the case when that reminiscing involves stories of the crazy things I was unaware that my kids and their cousins did in their younger years.  We can chuckle about these memories now since these “true confessions” occur long after the actual events and my grown children have survived to tell about them.  My family is very boisterous and conversations can be quite animated. It can be a little intimidating for those first experiencing these interactions.  But for me, these are the times that I long for at Christmas.  Presents are fun but don’t really mean much compared to the gifts of love and joy.  This is what I wait for expectantly every year.

Advent in the Christian calendar is the time of waiting prior to the birth of Jesus.  In the dictionary, Advent means “the coming or arrival especially of something very important.”  The Jewish people had waited on the Messiah for hundreds of years.  He was to be the very special one who would come to save His people.  When He did arrive, He came in such a lowly, humble way that most people didn’t recognize the gift in their midst.  But there were two elderly people who had been watchfully waiting for years to see Jesus.  Their names were Anna and Simeon.  We don’t know much about them except that they were in the temple in Jerusalem when Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus on the 8th day after His birth for dedication and circumcision as was the Jewish custom.  The Spirit of God opened their eyes so they were able to recognize who Jesus was and they both were overjoyed to know that He had finally arrived.  The gift of salvation for their people was here at last. Their waiting was over.

It’s been a little over 2000 years since the gift of Jesus arrived.  So much clutter surrounds Christmas that we sometimes forget to appreciate what was given to us so long ago.  Jesus is in our midst if we allow our eyes to be opened to see Him like Anna and Simeon.  He is Emmanuel, “God with us,” within us.  But shouldn’t we also be watchfully waiting as they did, for Jesus to come again, not just in Spirit but in physical form?  Didn’t He tell us over and over that He would be back?  Maybe since it has been so long since He walked on earth, we are tired of waiting.  We’re used to the way things are here and have become somewhat numb to the news about tragedy, illness and death.  We watch evil 24/7 on round-the-clock newscast until we accept life as it is.

But hope says, “evil doesn’t win”.  This was a recent statement that came from a parent who lost her child in the Newtown school shooting just a year ago.  With such horrific acts of violence all around us, we need to remember that we’ve been told the end of the story.  The very last chapter in the Bible, tells us that there will be a new Heaven and a new Earth.  The old, worn out world will pass away.  And God will come live with us forever.  Evil will be no more.  No more tears, no more suffering, no more children dying.

I wait for this expectantly, on tip toes, watching for the greatest gift of all to return.  Come, Lord Jesus, come!