Advent

Each year, for the four weeks leading up to Christmas, Wayfare editors curate content around four traditional Advent themes: hope, peace, joy, and love. You can find links to these offerings below, along with our thoughts on the meaning of the Advent season, and meditations for Christmas Eve by Tyler Johnson.

To receive Advent offerings in your inbox, first be sure you are subscribed, then click here and select “Holy Days.” To submit work to be considered for publication during Advent 2025, please see our call for submissions below.

Holy Days

Wayfare Advent Submissions

Rachel Jardine

December 17, 2024

Wayfare seeks personal essays; art; poetry; reflections on film, scripture, art, music; prayers; practices; short fiction; profiles and more for our 2025 Advent series. Deadline for first drafts: February 28, 2025

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What is Advent?

Long Lay the World

Rachel Jardine

November 26, 2024

Why did Jesus come as a baby?

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Come, Lord Jesus

Cecelia Proffit

November 25, 2023

At my children’s episcopal play group, Mother Nora carefully arranges four dark blue blocks next to two white ones in the circle of the church year, each block representing one week. “Advent,” she explains, “is the time for getting ready for the Mystery of Christmas.”

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Good Tidings of Great Joy

Eric D. Huntsman

November 25, 2023

When I was very young and living in East Germany, Christmas in our family began four weeks before Christmas Eve with the beginning of Advent. We made a fresh cut wreath from a fir or a spruce and put four candles on top of it and placed it on our kitchen table.

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Advent 1: Hope

Holy Days

A Thrill of Hope

Lorren Lemmons

November 23, 2024

This summer, I kept noticing dead birds of prey on the side of the highway. I live in a semi-rural area, but many of what once were cornfields are now being bulldozed into quick-build subdivisions. I still see owls swooping across the road if I drive home in the dark, and on the way to school, my children love to point out a red-tailed hawk diving into the pumpkin patch across the street to strike, emerging from the brush moments later with a vole in its talons.

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Choosing Hope

Kristine Haglund

November 28, 2023

Christmas is not only, and maybe not even especially, for the happy, the cheerful, the lucky. Christmas is most of all for those who know, deeply, that we dwell in darkness and still look for the light we hope will come.

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Advent 2: Peace

Holy Days

His Gospel is Peace

Megan Armknecht

December 5, 2024

Fear not.

When I think of the Christmas story, that divine phrase stands out in my mind. I hear it in Linus’s voice as he tells Charlie Brown “what Christmas is all about,” and recalls the angelic visitation to the shepherds. I remember that phrase intoned by my grandfather as he read the Christmas story from the Bible, while his children and grandchildren acted out the scenes with bathrobes and headbands.

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Building Peace

Melissa Dalton-Bradford

December 5, 2023

“On earth peace, good will toward men,” sang angels hovering over a land heaving with political and racial tension, ruled by a degenerate despot, choked by Roman oppression, crowded in on all sides by competing foreign powers—a land, which in just one generation would collapse under revolt, its temple razed to the ground.

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Advent 3: Joy

Holy Days

Sweet Hymns of Joy

Lori Forsyth

November 23, 2024

If you and I were collaborating to set up an ideal backdrop for Christmas joy, here are my first thoughts: we start with the enticing smell of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, perhaps from hot cider or cookies just coming out of the oven. Fresh greenery wraps around the banister, giving off the spicy, resinous scent of a winter forest. Next, some temperature contrast: warmth from a crackling fire is answered by a chill breeze swirling around the ankles as dear friends come through the front door, which can’t be shut right away because hugging everyone must happen first, this minute.

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Finding Joy

Diane Pritchett

December 12, 2023

There is a moment in teaching piano when a young student, either on their own or with some guidance from me, realizes that a small bit of rhythmic variation to a descending scale produces the melody “Joy to the World.” The look of surprised recognition that crosses their face is a joy to behold. Right there, grounded in the daily grind of mundane piano practice, is the opening line of a melody that connects to a world of musical possibility and beauty.

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Advent 4: Love

Holy Days

His Law is Love

Charlotte Wilson

November 23, 2024

Two months before Christmas, I miscarried. We think we can plan our families, reverse engineer that ideal June due date, conceive exactly when we want. But that doesn’t happen for everyone, and it didn’t happen for me.

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Cultivating Love

Sarah Perkins

December 19, 2023

One year ago, my husband Josh and I moved from Boston to rural Idaho with our kids and a few suitcases. We had just won back custody of our children two weeks earlier. Back in July, a false child abuse allegation had culminated in a pounding at the door at 1:00 a.m. Armed police officers and CPS social workers had come to take our infant and three-year-old sons from their beds and place them in foster care.

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Christmas Eve

On the Road to Jericho

Before the Night Grew Silent

Tyler Johnson and Rachel Jardine

December 19, 2023

Note: Our hope is that this reading can be deeply devotional. To be so, however, will require some moments of quiet and place and space where you can listen to the music (included below) and read along. We hope you’ll find some time, perhaps under the soft glow of lights in the last hours of evening, to enjoy.

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