Songs For The In-Between

“Advent tells us about our own lives as Christians, here and now. Advent is where we live, work, play, laugh, struggle, and die. Advent is the Time Between—between the first coming of Christ and the second coming, between darkness and dawn, between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ. It is not the time of fulfillment; it is the time of waiting.” (Fleming Rutledge)

“Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus” embodies the spirit of the Advent season—it’s invitational, and it’s expectational. 

“Right now, we’re in labor before the arrival of Jesus, and it hurts. We’re hearing the groans of our loved ones and are scared that we can’t do anything to fix it. We know that our neighbors are working and suffering in ways that we are unfamiliar with ourselves. The pain is in us and all around us. We can try to ignore it, or we can acknowledge it and groan through it together.”

“I chose to write about the Advent hymn, ‘Comfort, Comfort Ye My People’ because I believe all of us need to hear it and sing it as we wait. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop, this hymn is a reminder that we wait for God’s comfort. This is the counterintuitive beauty of Advent. It gives us space to feel the weight and darkness of life, but never lets us lose sight of the eternal hope and comfort in Christ’s final coming.”

Just as we know what Jesus did, we also know what he is going to do. And as we move through the verses of this song, we feel that already-not yet tension that comes with being the ones on the other side of the cross. We’re watching, we’re waiting, we’re hoping, just as those men of old did. Except we know exactly who we’re going to get.

That is the stuff of Advent for us.

“Maybe instead of just ‘silence,’ we’re supposed to think of this silence as ‘peace.’ It’s like a tuning fork struck firmly—the note sounds loudly while everything else stops to let it ring.”

“I hope that we see that ‘Joy to the World’ is an anthem for not only our Christmas season but for our on-going Advent season—a song for the in-between.”