Faith and Family / Sean Gallagher

Watch and wait for Christ’s coming in Advent with the innocence of children

Watching and waiting are at the heart of the season of Advent that the Church enters into this Sunday.

These are days of preparation for more than just the celebration of Christ’s first coming at Christmas, though. The Church also invites us to return in our hearts and minds to the stance to which our Lord called us in the Gospels, attentively preparing for his return again in glory:

“Watch. … You do not know when the lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’ ” (Mk 13:35-37).

We parents can see such watchfulness at this time of year in our young children who wait with great expectation for the gifts they hope to receive at Christmas, the time off they’ll have from school and the chance to have fun and celebrate with family and friends.

Parents who have long lost the innocence of their children and can feel burdened by the many daily duties of caring for their family might find such eager waiting in their children a persistent unwelcome reminder of all the preparations they have to do to make Christmas special for their little ones.

But, with the help of God’s grace, we parents can be drawn back closer to the watchful stance Christ calls us to through the witness given by our children’s excited awaiting for Christmas.

While we can certainly fulfill Christ’s call to us to prepare for his return by simply being faithful in doing God’s will in the often little and sometimes big things in our daily lives, it might be good for us to have a more conscious watchfulness for our Lord coming into our lives.

That can be the case for us being open to him coming among us here and now in the people we’re called to serve: our children and other relatives, neighbors, co-workers and people on the margins of society.

But there’s something spiritually healthy in having a yearning, like the Israelites of old, for the coming of the Messiah in glory.

The absence of such a desire can suggest that we’re too attached to the things of this world. As good as this world can be—and God created it as good—always remember that our destiny in heaven infinitely transcends it.

Maybe our children’s yearning in these days before Christmas for something that they’ve been dreaming of, for something that they do not have, cannot get for themselves and can only receive as a gift can be a friendly reminder to us adults.

It can be an invitation to allow God’s grace to renew in us something of the innocence we’ve lost and to nurture in our hearts a conscious desire to see Christ return in all his glory.

As this yearning in our hearts is renewed, we are called to nurture it in the hearts of our children. For while their watching and waiting for their Christmas gifts can be a means for us to grow in grace, we don’t want them to become too attached to this world like we might have become through the years.

Our joy at Christmas can grow beyond our dreams if we families, both parents and children alike, watch and wait together for the coming of Christ during this Advent season. †