Advent Reflections: We Are Always Looking For Kings

Last updated on: December 11, 2016 at 9:11 am by Kerry Connelly

Advent Reflections: We Are Always Looking For Kings 2016-12-11T09:11:20-04:00 Kerry Connelly

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This advent has really driven it home for me: sometimes, waiting sucks.

I’ve been spending much of this advent season waiting, and contemplating, and trying like hell not to strive. After all, striving feels like it’s in my nature. Striving feels like everything I should be doing. It’s familiar and comforting, albeit exhausting.

When business gets slow, it’s time to hustle. When the holidays are roaring down on you like a subway train with broken breaks, it’s time to shift into high gear to make everything perfect. When everyone around you has expectations, and the ones you have for yourself are the highest, don’t you dare let anyone down.

I’m thinking a lot about Mary. So young. Really, just a few years older than my daughter, which puts a lot of things into frightening perspective. Even though my daughter has the heart and mind of a forty year old who could probably run the country like a boss (and everything would be incredibly tidy — where did she come from?) but still. If I think waiting now is hard, remember when you were a kid? Remember when thirty minutes took for-eeeevvvvver?

And once the angel came and made his promise, Mary’s world surely started to blow up around her as her pregnancy grew. Her fiance (who for all intents and purposes was essentially her husband) was I’m sure pissed. My guess is her parents were heartbroken and shamed. Probably her neighbors were gossipy assholes.

I remember high school, and that girl who got pregnant. I remember how she was treated. How we treated her. I remember.

And all Mary could do was get bigger inside and wait.

I think that might be the hard part about the waiting — it’s that while it’s happening, we’re getting bigger inside. Bigger inside with hope, with expectation, with desire, with the urge to do something. To push the creation instead of submit to it.

Or maybe we just can’t handle the freedom of being.

Maybe we just can’t handle the quiet stillness of our identity in God — that silent assurance that yes, Jesus is mine and I am His and that really does make everything eternally okay.

Maybe instead, we are always looking for kings.

We want to enthrone tiny dictators in our hearts, creating tiny little altars to them, because in the length of the waiting, we forget God’s promises. For the ancient Israelites, they wanted a badass king who would come and represent them to the world, because just being God’s chosen wasn’t enough. They never stopped waiting for their king. When he finally came, they didn’t recognize him.

Today, our dictators are internal — the voices in our head that tell us we need the newest iPhone, and we better breastfeed until the kids are thirty, and we need to fit into the jeans we wore when we were twelve, and our life better be Pinterest-worthy or it’s all going to hell in a handbasket.

God created us for freedom, but we keep looking for kings.

In this season of advent, the great time of waiting, I am thinking a lot about kings and despots, striving and desire. I have chosen to lay down my desire for this season, to set it aside and be still in the waiting, and this is no easy task for an overachiever like me. I continue to be drawn to the “wilderness of my striving”, choosing to be enslaved by the demands this world makes to be better, skinnier, more than I am already.

It’s an intentional choice I’m making to pause, to be sure that, if I’m waiting for a king, that I’m waiting for the right one: King of Kings. Lord of Lords.

They don’t call him Prince of Peace for nothing.

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