My clever child can bend time with his bare hands

As I set out our family Advent wreath, (and tried to explain to my children that we don’t light all the candles at once), I was again reminded of the message of Advent: Waiting.

Children have no conception of time. I recently left for a conference in Indianapolis. I was gone for five days, and I tried to prepare my children to understand the amount of time I would be away by crafting a paper chain. They helped me with the construction paper links, and I told them that when they tore the last chain off, that would be the day that Mommy comes home.

Upon my arrival in Indiana, I had a text message from my husband: “FaceTime when you can. Ollie needs you.” As I headed through the airport to baggage claim, I FaceTimed and realized that my son had torn through the paper chain, because that would mean I would be home.

Waiting and patience are difficult for toddlers, but it’s difficult, too, for adults. Our society is “on demand.”

I was talking with my students about streaming a few episodes of a show for our class. It was on Hulu and Hulu has a free trial for students, so I explained that they should do the trial if they didn’t already have the service. Their response: “You mean, we’d have to watch the commercials?” Others mentioned their impatience with shows that release episodes weekly. On demand – that’s exactly how I would describe our society today.

And, with that instant gratification, we lose a certain sense of what it feels like to wait. We lose what it means to anticipate and the feelings that accompany it. We lose the excitement that builds as we get closer to the goal that we want to achieve, to the object that we want to attain, to the season that we hope to ring in.

As we sat around the dinner table, we reminded our children that the lighting of each candle brings us closer and closer to the return of Jesus in the manager. Rather than an Advent calendar filled with chocolates, we created a kindness calendar (made of the same strips of construction paper for those chains to hopefully cement the idea of waiting). Each morning, we tear a piece of the chain, and there’s a simple act of kindness that would be accessible to 4- and 2-year-olds.

Hopefully, this can be a new tradition fostering in the value of Advent and the Christmas season. It’s not about the gifts we receive; it’s about the simple gifts that we can give to those around us.

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