Christmas

These emblems call us to patience and perseverance. Christ’s first coming was centuries in fulfillment, and his second coming has proved to be the same. Our act of remembrance anticipates hope—a hope not weakened by delay but strengthened by longing. We enter God’s sense of time in which it is not so much the expanse of years as the certainty of outcome.

The accomplishment of Messiah’s first coming undergirds our confidence about his coming again. Meantime, conditions may be hard, but, for the joy that lies beyond them, we endure as those whose confidence rests on the advent culminating in what this feast commemorates.