Advent in the Shadows of Service
Advent in the Shadows of Service
December is a strange month when you’re ministering to soldiers overseas. As you’re walking the roads of your local Christmas market, or hanging lights on your porch, or sitting in church surrounded by familiar faces, many of the soldiers I talk with are counting down something very different: days to redeployment. Days without seeing their kids. Days without a full night’s sleep. Days under unfamiliar stars.
Advent, the Christian season of waiting and expectation before Christmas, is a time when our yearning is allowed to be sacred. In fact, it’s essentially a time when our yearning is supposed to be sacred. But for many of our deployed soldiers, waiting is not a joyful task. It’s full of longing, and heaviness, and grief. Waiting often brings about an ache. It’s waiting in an empty house with no decorations up, and sitting with your loneliness. Waiting with your hope in your hand, like a hot piece of coal, to see if it will set your heart on fire.
The soldiers I’ve talked to this month, who are deployed or on exercises around the globe, have reminded me of what a full season of waiting looks like. I’ve been sending quick texts and voice notes to soldiers at all hours of the day and night. Their yearning has a shape and a texture of its own.
One soldier texted me after a 12-hour training exercise. “Chaps, I’m trying to feel Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like anything right now,” he wrote. I remember his voice sounding raw in that message, even though he had no shortage of words. It wasn’t bitterness I heard. It was emptiness. He was so, so tired. Overextended. Far from home. Far from family. He was used to walking around in his element of sand instead of snow. Without any of the rituals and routines that usually anchored him.
We talked about what hope felt like, when hope didn’t come to you on candles and a chorus. What peace looked like, when all around you was anything but. In his search, I saw something holy. A kind of Advent longing that was more baptismal, and real, and raw, than anything I could dress up with adjectives or verses. A raw longing, if I can call it that.
The week before Christmas, another soldier told me he’d been avoiding the holiday video calls with his family, because every time he saw their faces, he felt the pang of not being home harder. When he said that, I felt something in my throat catch, and then I realized I’d been holding my breath. He was honest, and I was relieved. A relief I didn’t quite expect. But I realized: sometimes the things that are the sweetest in our lives are the things that hurt us when they’re absent. Sometimes love hurts. We prayed for the courage to open our eyes to another day, and to gently face the ache.
I’ve been ministering a lot lately to soldiers who are spending their Christmases not at home, but in hot desert countries, cold Arctic countries, countries in conflict zones, countries so far away from their homes in Europe and the States that a video call was as good as it was going to get. I’m starting to see Advent in its fullness in these soldiers’ lives. Not the beautiful, candlelit, felt Advent, but the Advent that was more like the first: a world that needs peace. People who search for it in the darkness. Hope lighting unexpectedly in the cracks and crannies.
This has been one of the truths God has been teaching me in this ministry over and over again: that God meets us in the raw, in the unedited moments. In the loneliness behind a late-night text message. In the soldiers who keep moving their weary feet forward, even when they’re full of longing to be home. In the ache.
And this December, December is slowly starting to take shape in me too. God is slowly teaching me to look for Him, not just in the warm, cozy places. But to look for Him in the liminal places. To look for the coming of Christ in the desert, in the deployment zones, in the whispered prayers of the soldiers, I get on the phone or video chat with them when it’s already 3 am at home. They don’t know how to hope yet. And somehow, across the screens and time zones and the dirt roads and the cities we can’t even pronounce, I know that Advent promise hasn’t abandoned these waiting places, either: light is coming. Light is on the way, even here.
Lieutenant Kenroy Grant, Chaplain Candidate
LT Grant is a Clinical Pastoral Education student offering pastoral care to deployed soldiers and military families. His ministry explores presence, resilience, and the sacred hope that emerges even in seasons of distance and uncertainty.
