There is a phrase in common use just now that troubles me; “My life is on hold just now”. Now I’m no philosopher, but that doesn’t make sense to me. It sounds as though the life in question was on Netflix and you could just press the pause button and start life up again some time later. Our days are ticking away whether we are locked down, locked up or having a ball. The reality is ‘this is your life‘ even though Eamonn Andrews isn’t around with his big red book and things may not be exactly the way that you would wish them to be (twas ever thus).

This week there was “Good News” preached by politicians and screaming out in the headlines of newspapers. A vaccine for COVID has been approved for use in the UK by the regulator MHRA and the narrative has switched to “we can now starting living our lives again”. So what have such people been doing for the last nine months – hibernating?

Sadly I think there is going to be a lot of disappointment around for anyone who thinks that everything will revert to its pre-COVID state any time soon and that Pfizer/BioNTech or Oxford/AstroZenica have some magic potion to bring things back to normal, like an episode out of the tales of Hans Christian Anderson.

The Advent theme is that the time of promise is drawing to an end and the time of fulfilment is drawing near. For Isaiah, it’s the end of exile for Israelites in Babylon. For John the Baptist it’s the coming of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah. So what is it for us at the end of 2020, when people who want to ‘take their lives off hold’, see that long-awaited fulfilment as being delivery of a pharmaceutical?

Advent is Good News in the midst of the struggle. With the Good News of the Incarnation, God has already entered our struggles. He is himself Good News from the battle front, as it were. We hear the voice that commands us to prepare a way in the wilderness. But the way that we are urged to prepare is not our way. The way we are to prepare is the way of the Lord and that isn’t the same thing at all.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8-9

Our lives are not on hold, we are not missing out, we are being given a unique opportunity to be in at the start of something far more wonderful than the arrival of a pharmaceutical that must be stored at minus 78 degrees and administered in batches of 975 doses!!