When the Adventure Comes for Us
The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)
Advent: When the Adventure Comes for Us
If we’re honest, most of us don’t yet want what God is calling us to.
We want something from Him: peace, guidance, maybe a little clarity, but not necessarily the path He actually lays at our feet.
Advent exposes that reluctance.
It pulls back the curtain on the fact that God’s call is rarely what we would have chosen, and it never waits for us to feel ready.
The very word Advent comes from the Latin adventus - a “coming to,” an arrival that isn’t manufactured or managed.
The closest English cognate is adventure: something that happens to us, something we don’t script.
I’ve always appreciated Chesterton’s quip that “an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered; an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
That’s what Advent really is.
Not a season of sentimental waiting, but a season in which God arrives uninvited and upends the illusion of control.
Jesus comes to us. He always has. He always does.
He is the great Adventure that breaks into our well-defended plans.
We don’t get to schedule when Christ will “pass by,” when His presence will interrupt our lives, or when His voice will press in and ask more of us than we thought possible.
So the question becomes painfully simple: are we in a posture of receptivity?
Are we ready, like Mary, to say, “Be it done to me according to your word” - even when everything in us wants to stall, delay, negotiate, or run the other way?
Abraham’s story is the same story. God calls, and Abraham goes - but we romanticize that moment.
We imagine a serene patriarch gliding into obedience. Yet what the text doesn’t spell out is just as real: the looks his family must have given him, the disbelief of his community, the whispering that a man had lost his mind.
What he left was comfort, stability, and approval in exchange for calling, promise, and obscurity.
That is the nature of God’s invitations. They are costly, inconvenient, and transformative.
And this is why Advent matters: it reminds us that God’s coming is not passive. It is not polite. It is not predictable.
It is an invasion of grace. A summons into the unknown. An adventure that arrives on God’s timing, not ours.
The question is not whether Christ will come - He always does.
The question is whether we will keep dragging our feet…or open our hands, unclench our plans, and let His arrival reorder everything.
Advent is not primarily about our search for God.
It’s about God’s relentless coming for us.
And that may be the most frightening - and the most hopeful - adventure of all.
Onward and upward,
Ted
An Advent Book Worth Reading
Looking for a worthwhile read this Advent? Joseph Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives shows that the Nativity is not myth or metaphor, but the decisive moment when divine truth enters human time and vulnerability. The child in the manger, Ratzinger insists, is the true Logos, quietly overturning power, redefining kingship, and demanding a personal response from every reader.
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