Advent Week 4: Love
Love with its sleeves rolled up.
Here we are, friends, at the final stretch of Advent. The nights are long, the candles are low, and part of me wants to sigh, Surely we’ve waited enough for one season. But this is the week the Church hands us the candle of love, and not the tidy, gift-wrapped kind.
It’s the love that moves toward need without hesitation: the neighbor who shows up with warm bread, the shoveled walkway, the “made it home” text, the presence offered by someone who can’t fix anything but wants you to feel less alone. It’s the love that begins not with spectacle, but with a baby—tiny, vulnerable, unsteady—a God who decides that being with us matters more than being impressive.
Advent love is earthy and inconvenient and beautifully ordinary. It arrives on December 23, when you’re sure you’ve failed at Christmas, and whispers, You are already ready. I come to people exactly like this. For God’s love has never hovered above us like a theory. It puts on skin. It moves into our neighborhoods and our tired hearts. And it stays.
This week’s reflections:
Each devotion will go live early that morning, so be sure to refer back to this list as you journey through the weeks of Advent.
Sunday, December 21 — Advent Day 22: Thomasing on the Longest Night
Monday, December 22 — Advent Day 23: Love with a giant red bow.
Tuesday, December 23 — Advent Day 24: The Unwrapped and the Undone
Wednesday, December 24 — Advent Day 25: Standing at the Manger
Thursday, December 25 — Christmas Day: God is here.
Listen along:
Our Required Listening: Holiday 2025 playlist is here to keep you company in the season of waiting. Listen along to some of my favorite holiday tunes this year on Apple Music and Spotify!
If the Lord so loved us all
that His Son was born a babe to die,
then we must hear the holy call
to love, sometimes not knowing why.
It's hard to love the ones we loathe,
MAGAT or Antifa thug,
but it's these we're meant to clothe
in nakedness, and then to hug
without a flinch, a scowl, a sneer,
without the veiled thought clearly shown,
for we're to prove that God is near
and that through us He may be known
and that we offer Heaven's gate
to the ones that we most hate.
“Love with its sleeves rolled up”. Thank you for another way of expressing love as an action verb. On reflecting on my father at his death I described in his eulogy that he was “love in action” and your words capture his heart and life more deeply. Perfect time to read your reflection on this cold and bright morning as my dad met me outside on the porch watching the sunrise. He always sat outside on his porch drinking coffee and watching the day begin. Your words and the sunrise brought me moments of joy and sorrow for this longest day. Thank you for starting my day with love and the call to put it in action. You are lovely.