Happy New Year!

No, not that new year. Advent ... the beginning of a new year in the church calendar. Officially it's the four Sundays leading up to Christmas: four themes (hope, love, joy, peace), four candles (well, five counting the Christ candle to be lit on Christmas day), a wreath for the candles, special colors (lots of purple, but you can have blue and gray and mauve is the big color for the third Sunday of Advent: rejoice!). Great stuff for church geeks stuck between the First Coming and the Second Coming. (Ever seen that great coffee mug? Perennial favorite of church secretaries, it says "Jesus is coming soon" on one side and "Look busy!" on the other. Too right.)

I love Advent, not least because of the purple and the candles, but also because it celebrates waiting and in-betweenness, which is what my life seems to be about these days. Waiting for the kids to grow up, waiting for my best beloved to find a job here so we can live in the same zip code, waiting to finish the Ph.D., waiting to get a real job again.

Of course, that's the thing about waiting. If you are not working your ass off about whatever it is you are waiting for, you will probably spend the rest of your life waiting. Advent reminds us waiting is active -- like the belly of a woman in her ninth month, there is a lot going on and plenty to do. And still ... the wait goes on, right alongside the work.

Advent is about "already" and "not-yet" ... Jesus has already been born, and we are already celebrating the reality of God-with-us, God-with-skin-on, and yet we have not yet lived into the fullness of what Jesus showed us the first time around: what love really looks like.

So, while we "wait" to live into the reality of God's idea of love, what is the work? For me, at long last, it is to try -- as my old preaching professor Joey Jeter used to say -- to say a good word for Jesus. In my case -- God help me -- to write a dissertation. I have waited and worked a long time to get to this point: 60 hours of graduate coursework, two language exams, four qualifying exams, four field exams, a dissertation proposal, student teaching ... and now, to write.

To try to say a good word for what love looks like, in the days of waiting and working.