"Come, Lord Jesus" As a Cry of Advent Surrender

In my pursuit of a slow and simple Advent I chose a devotional with super short readings (three pages or less). Little did I know how profoundly those brief daily readings would impact me.

The portion that has given me the most pause comes from the first day's devotion:

"Come, Lord Jesus," the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. Perfect fullness is always to come and we do not need to demand it now. This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves.

 When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or any dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were "Why weren't you this for me? Why didn't life do that for me?" we are refusing to say "Come, Lord Jesus." We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given by God.

"Come, Lord Jesus" is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level and our Source is beyond ourselves. 

The truth is I'm usually not willing to live without closure. I hate the feeling of non-fulfillment.

If I'm honest, I'm often not content to walk through life with my hands open to whatever future God wants to create for me.

There are definitely situations in my life that I want to be resolved on my terms.

This reading made me stop and think about what would happen if these scenarios weren't resolved according to my demands. No matter how badly I want things to work out my way, I don't have the power to guarantee that any of these situations will resolve according to my wishes.

If my desired future doesn't come to be, will God still be good? Will I still be able to find happiness? And what if by insisting on my desired outcome, I'm actually shutting down the possibility of something entirely different, maybe even better, that God has in store for me.

Sometimes it feels so right and holy to passionately pray and earnestly work toward a particular outcome, but this energy has a dark side when it amounts to saying, "I cannot be truly happy, I cannot rest until this situation is different in my life."

As I pondered the day's reading, I was reminded of the words of the Scottish theologian John Baillie:

If we believe in God at all we must allow him to bring us his enlightenment and salvation in ways of his own choosing, and it would indeed be surprising if these were not very different from anything that we, from our limited perspective and with our limited wisdom and intelligence, could have foreseen.

In other words, if I had the power and wisdom to solve any of the thorny problems that have been tripping me up for much longer than I'd like to admit, they would have been solved by now. When the situation is so beyond me, so complicated, so profoundly hopeless that only God can fix it, it is utter foolishness to demand that things go my way. It makes perfect sense that my solution, my salvation would be found in God's moving in ways entirely unforeseen by me. 

As I wrestle with these reflections, I find myself returning again and again to the following questions:

What expectations can I surrender in order to open myself to Jesus's unforeseen coming in my life?

Where am I feeding the discontent that I cannot be happy unless _____ happens?

When do I notice myself balking at the discomfort of emptiness and non-fulfillment, and how can I use this awareness as a reminder to practice opening myself to the future God has for me?