Today is December first, the beginning of the last month of 2022. Advent season started last Sunday.

Despite the liturgical calendar, and that my family has already put up the Christmas tree, it doesn’t feel like Advent to me until we hit December

It is a strange time of year. We humans aren’t good at waiting. We want instant gratification. Yet at this time of year, it is all about the waiting.

At least it is only four weeks. Or 24 days now. That will speed by quickly, and then it will be Christmas.

The period leading up to that first Christmas was much longer. The Jewish people had been promised that a Messiah would be coming to save them.

They knew God always keeps his promises. But they never expected that it would be a few hundred years. Patience is something we have difficulty learning.

And when the Messiah came, most people ignored him. He didn’t match their preconceptions. Open and inquiring minds are frequently in short supply. I suspect I might have shared those preconceptions and missed the opportunity.

Which is why God tends to be, among so many other things, a god of second (and third and fourth) chances. So many of us get it wrong the first time.

In this season when we celebrate waiting, I will be thinking of the anticipation surrounding that first Advent. I will reread the Christmas story; probably more than once.

And I will also spend some time contemplating another of God’s promises, the second coming of Jesus Christ. It’s been more than a few hundred years and we are still waiting. But as we learned at that first Christmas, God always keeps his promises.