AWAKE TO WHAT IS QUIETLY ARRIVING
Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. - Matthew 24:42
As Advent begins, I hold close what Henri Nouwen once wrote: “Receiving is an art. It means allowing the other to become part of our lives. It asks for the inner freedom to say, ‘Without you, I wouldn’t be who I am.’”
Something in me exhales when I sit with these words. They reveal what I have been slowly learning to trust over the years. The people in today’s Gospel were living and moving through their days, following the rhythms of life. Yet this reading reminds me that spiritual wakefulness isn't about doing more but about being more. It encourages us to listen and notice what is already emerging beneath the surface of our days. It invites us to be held and humbly admit that we need what God is offering us.
And this is where Advent meets me most tenderly, in the places where my body speaks its honesty before my mind can put it into words. The tightness in my shoulders. The fatigue I keep trying to push past. The heaviness that signals something deeper stirring inside. The breath that escapes before I realize I was holding it. These are invitations, not inconveniences. They are small openings that ask me to slow down, pay attention, and return to myself. And whenever I come home to myself, I find that God is already there waiting for me and saying, “Stay awake. I am here.”
When I awaken to what is present, a humbling and freeing awareness rises in me, a quiet knowing that I am not alone in carrying my life. Grace meets me, even in the times when I believed I had to shoulder everything myself. There is a strength beneath my effort and a wisdom humming under my instincts. And when I shift from doing to being, something within me opens. I feel more rooted, more aware, and more receptive to what is unfolding inside me. And in that opening, I recognize a God who comes gently, unexpectedly, and often in the spaces I am most likely to overlook.
Lord, help me to stay awake and notice how You are already here with me.
Tam Lontok