Over the years, our founder and Senior Fellow Dr. Steve Garber has written many short meditations inspired by the Advent season, reflections that bring us deeper into the biblical story and the broader traditions that surround the Christmas season. Readers of our site regularly revisit them, so we are pleased to gather them as a collection of Advent meditations for you today. May they bless you as we wait for the celebration of Christ’s birth.
Lost in the bustle of the holiday season, it is easy to forget that Advent is a waiting, traditionally a season in which the church waits to celebrate, with the celebration only following in the twelve days of Christmas that follow. Steve reflects on that in light of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories: Always Winter, Never Christmas
The incarnation is the hope of history, the earth- and heaven-shattering intervention of God in history, a decisive turning of the largest story of them all, the story of time itself. Steve thinks about the hopes and fears of all the years in the biblical narrative: Where Hope and History Meet
Steve turns to the work of another “Steve,” the poet Steve Turner, his poem Christmas is Really for the Children, considering the challenges of life in a fallen world as they impinge on Christmas celebration: The Hopes and Fears of All the Years
As many of our readers know, Steve loves to read behind the basic plot of a book, to see it connect to the broader story of our world. He meditates on “the story that runs through the story” in the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life: A Christmas Eve Meditation
Returning again to It’s a Wonderful Life, Steve reminds us that it is fundamentally a story of choosing, when and how we choose the deeper choices of our lives: Vocation and Choices in “It’s A Wonderful Life”
Maybe lesser known regarding Christmas, but hardly as an author, is two-time Newberry Award winner Katherine Paterson. Steve considers her hopeful series of short stories, stories of grace around modern Christmas: The Christmas Stories of Katherine Paterson
Turning, of course, to Charles Dickens’s famous stories, Steve considers A Christmas Carol, trying to understand what it means to really “see” in light of the world in which we live: Marley Was Dead
Finally, Steve considers his best-loved Christmas carol, the wonderfully contemplative melody Of the Father’s Love Begotten, a reminder that God the Father loves us, so much so that he sent his only begotten son: Of the Father’s Love Begotten…
We pray these devotions bless you this Advent as we let our waiting for Christmas remind us that we ultimately wait not for Christmas, but for Christ to return.