Every year I think it’s going to be different. (Every year it winds up the same.)

I buy a bright new devotional. I restock the candles for our wreath. I make the kids a countdown calendar, complete with chocolate and small surprises for each day of December.

But then life interrupts — every time.

I never finish the devotional. We forget to light the candles and say the prayers at dinner. Kids end up fighting over the chocolate more than enjoying the daily surprise. I find myself wandering store aisles at 10:00 p.m. on December 22, head throbbing, feet aching, trying to buy something for someone, who knows who.

Advent never turns out the way I want. All those perfect versions of the-best-holiday-season-ever? They only live in my mind, never the reality under my roof.

My dirty little secret, whispered from one woman’s ear to another, is that I love Advent — waiting for God in the quiet dark — but I don’t love December.

This year, I foolishly thought I would be on top of everything for Christmas because I’d be recovering from surgery during November, so I’d have plenty of time to make plans from my recovery bed and order everything online. (Are you laughing yet? Go right ahead.)

What I did instead was sleep. Rest. Recover. Exactly what my body and soul needed.

Now I find myself standing sheepishly (ok, sitting, still tired) on the threshold of a new season, utterly unprepared for what comes next.

This is exactly where Advent is supposed to find us. The point is to prepare for Christ’s coming, not to wear ourselves out before Christmas Eve. The purpose of the season is to humble us back into love for our Savior, not to try and save the season ourselves.

So this year, as my body recovered and my scars healed, I decided to do the most obvious thing. I asked God what I should do for Advent, since every best intention I’d made in the past had always fallen short. I was tired of ending up with another Advent that felt too fast, too fleeting, and too cluttered with holiday chaos before December 25th even dawned.

Do you know what I heard back in prayer? (It’s so simple, I’m almost embarrassed.)

God told me to sit on the couch. And do nothing.

In all seriousness, the strongest response I felt to my prayer was the call to sit my do-too-much self down in our family room, ignore the mess around me, and spend time with God. Maybe read something. Maybe pray in the quiet. Maybe do nothing.

I heard the message loud and clear to stop, slow down, and seek God. Right in the chaos of the busiest month of the year.

For a few weeks, I felt foolish about this non-plan for Advent. Friends were sharing their shiny, starry-eyed plans for spiritual disciplines or memory-making family celebrations, and I was going to sit on my lumpy couch and stare at the kids’ toys on the floor?

But you can’t ignore the voice of God when it comes clearly and won’t quit. I know what I’ll be doing this December, and it’s less.

The smallness of the Scriptures surrounding Jesus’s birth never fails to surprise me. What we know to be the biggest event in human history happened in backwater Bethlehem on a quiet night that almost no one noticed. The Gospels don’t share story after story of everything that happened to Mary and Joseph in the days and months around Christ’s coming; they offer only a handful of short stories that leave much to our imagination — a reminder of how God’s best work is often hidden, slow, quiet, and countercultural.

But the prophets remind us how God’s under-the-radar work was precisely the plan:

“But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.”
Micah 5:2 NRSVUE

If the Holy One whose birth is the reason for the season saw fit to come among our chaos as Emmanuel — God-with-us who shared our humanity as a helpless baby — who am I to think doing one-more-thing will add to the beauty and wonder of Christmas?

All we have to do is open up our lives in small ways to receive the Christ Child again. To say yes like Mary. To let our plans be turned upside down like Joseph. To welcome even the strangest of nudges in prayer, like the call to do less — to stop rushing, slow down, and seek the voice of the God we wait to welcome again.

If you care to join me on the couch this Advent, feel free to shove aside whatever mess you find and make yourself comfortable. Slowly, quietly, surely, God will meet us right where we are, all over again.

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