"Come Lord Jesus," the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now. This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. . . When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that any dissatisfaction be taken away, we're saying as it were, "Why weren't you this for me? Why didn't life do that for me?" We are refusing to say, "Come, Lord Jesus." We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given to us by God.
"Come, Lord Jesus" is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level. . . We are able to trust that Jesus will come again just as he has come in our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world. Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and "Come, Lord Jesus" is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.
-richard rohr, Dec. 6th huffington post
we boast in the hope of the glory of God. not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
