Practicing Advent When It Hurts: Hope

This is a really different Advent season for me this year. For the first time in nearly a decade, I am not the one planning the worship, not the one crafting the flow of anticipation, not the one handing the candle to the wide-eyed child on the third Sunday. This year, the sanctuary will hold a different kind of silence for me, not the quiet of holy preparation, but the quiet of absence.

Back in September, I marked ten years as a worship leader. For eight of those Advents, the creative spark, the choosing of hymns, the weaving of scriptures, the sacred choreography of candlelight spreading through the dark, was a trust placed in my hands. It was my passion, a calling I felt deeply from the Lord. And now, due to circumstances that still carry an ache, this Advent will unfold without my touch in the music, in the planning. That specific, familiar joy has been banked.

Can I be honest? It hurts a little. Even from a place of healing and a knowledge that I am in a better space overall, a piece of my heart feels…robbed. It’s as if the very instrument God used to play the melody of hope in me has been gently, but firmly, set aside.

And it is from this exact place, this raw, unvarnished feeling of a candle unlit—that this series was born. Because if Advent is only for the planners, the celebrants, the ones holding the flame, then it is too small. It fails the very people it’s meant for: the ones sitting in the pews, hearts aching with their own versions of silence. The ones for whom “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is not a sweet melody, but a desperate, tear-streaked prayer.

This series, then, is for us.

For the one who feels sidelined from their passion.

For the one grieving a loss that makes the “merry and bright” feel like a mockery.

For the one waiting for healing, for reconciliation, for an answer that doesn’t come.

For the one who looks at the wreath and sees not four candles of hope, peace, joy, and love, but four weeks of having to hold it together.

This is our Advent, too. Perhaps it is the most authentic Advent of all. For the first Advent, the one in Bethlehem, didn’t happen in a perfectly curated sanctuary. It happened in the messy, uncertain, and often painful backwater of a weary world. Hope didn’t appear as a triumphant blast of light for the planners and the powerful. It was a flicker. A fragile, vulnerable flame lit in the dark, stable of a heart that wonders, “Can this be true?”

Advent is the season where we are scripturally invited to dwell in that “not yet.” The prophets didn’t speak from a place of fulfillment, but of longing. “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2). But first, they had to name the darkness. They had to live in the long night of exile, silence, and waiting. Their hope was not a feeling; it was a memory of a promise and a stubborn trust in the Promise-Giver. “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:21-23). Even in Lamentations, the Bible’s book of tears, hope is an act of will, a decision to call truth to mind when the present reality overwhelms.

This is the hope of Advent. It is not a platitude that says, “Cheer up, it’s fine!” It is the gritty, determined act of lighting a single candle against the deepening dark and saying, “I remember. And I choose to trust.” It is the hope of Romans 8:24-25: “For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Our hurt, our absence, our unlit candles, they do not disqualify us from Advent. They position us right in the heart of its ancient story.

So let’s practice Advent here, in the hurt. Let’s acknowledge the empty space where our candle once was. And then, let’s look, really look, into the growing dark of the season, not with plastered smiles, but with the stubborn, dogged faith of watchmen waiting for the morning.

Hope is not the absence of pain. It is the conviction, etched into Scripture and history, that there is a Light, and the darkness has not, and will not, overcome it. Even if, for now, our own hands feel empty, we can turn them upward and wait for the dawn.

Let’s begin.