Construction and Comfort: Isaiah's call to attend Advent 2025

One more week of normal work until the week of Christmas brings us close to the end of 2025. Light is fading on our WV farm as we brace for plummeting temperatures and a winter storm watch today. Clouds have covered the sun most of this month, providing a physical context of dull obscurity.

A year ago, the words I anticipated forming the year were 'mend, send, attend'. And as we draw near the year's close, I hear these words echoed in the chapter I keep coming back to, Isaiah 35, and in Isaiah 40's opening Messiah chorus. 'Mend and send' are congruent with the highway construction project in the desert, the filling of valleys and leveling of hills, the straightening of country-road curves. The advent season of waiting is not passively idle, there is a call to preparation. God is coming. The realities of a redeemed future reach back into current events as we mend the broken people and places, as we send good forward. A year ago, I expected the setting of mending to be Bundibugyo, and the setting of sending to be in-person in our Africa area. A Trinity-Forum podcast this week said that hospitality entails both preparation to serve AND embrace of disruption. A good word for life and an apt thumbnail of this year upended by Stage IV cancer and continental shift. Still 'mend' and 'send' sound satisfyingly active. 

Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zacharias, shepherds and magi, all had mend-and-send sorts of roadwork in the months before Jesus' arrival too. Most of them were literally on the desert highway, literally moving towards Jerusalem in anticipation. From paying taxes to setting up camp to labor and poetry, they were each doing their part to make way for the coming one.

Having lived on Bundibugyo road from muddy quagmire to paved highway, having spent decades in a place where childbirth requires foot-path hikes and still risks death even in the best circumstances, having witnessed the arrival of new life be not sterilely technical or safely separate from the messiness of life, having spent Christmas displaced by war and by fatal epidemic . . . the reality of the road resonates. And here on our gravel, riverside road in Sago, the "take me home" of this state sings out a longing for those roads to lead to belonging. Those with little power mend and send in small daily faithfulness around the globe, moving towards home.

    

But that final word, 'attend', is the one I'm ending the year on. Comfort ye my people, speak peace . . these are phrases of pause, of paying attention. Phrases of noticing a change, a new situation, a pardon and a hope. The promise of a King who is pictured as a shepherd, the one who gathers gently, is a radical departure from the machinations of human empire.  Presence, not power. A new way of thinking (repent means "change your mind-map") can only be noticed if we slow and stop. If we listen and look. If we 'attend'.

Advent should be a season of paying attention. But in our attention economy of 2025, such focus requires intention. I am guilty of spiraling into the ever-increasing wealth of writing, art, music, shows, quips, thoughts, opinions, news available from every corner of the planet every second of the day. Choosing only four (4!) Advent series sounds crazy. . . but there are so many options. Today's passage in one of them quotes Karl Barth on Zacharias as a story that, even a hundred or two thousand years ago, listening to God requires us to stop talking about ourselves. Requires a shaking encounter, a disruptive re-set. Stop. Attend. 

Because 'attend' is more than concentration. When we 'attend', we are present. Present in the behind-the-veil reality glimpsed by Isaiah. Present in the God of the universe turning our lives upside down to make the whole world better. Presence with God in the cloud is a double-edged experience, the comfort of being enveloped in goodness, the disorientation of having our whole conception of goodness reset.

Let me end with Is 35:3. Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. That is how we enter such a draining attention, asking for Jesus' strength in our weakness. It is also our family verse for December since I'm recovering from surgery on a second broken wrist that has left my hands weak, and Luke is recovering from major surgery on his knee, and everyone feels feeble in the face of Scott's cancer.

 Not to mention the despairing directions of much of our world this season. So my final image is from a former teacher on our Bundi team who continues to be a key support to our Area, and spent 2025 in her own life-threatening struggle that brought her baby prematurely and risked her baby's life too. Here we are, in the reality of a life of brokenness (see the feeding tube still many months later) but embracing the smile and color of Christmas, the truth that Jesus changes everything. Waiting, attending, because love is stronger than death.