Faith’s Long December

A few weeks ago, I sat with a student who had just lost someone to an overdose. Four years earlier, she had lost her uncle the same way. She received the news in an airport while her friend was unconscious but still alive. She told me she had prayed with that desperate clarity you only get when you’re out of options.

And then she asked me: “Where is God in this?” She asked it in a few different ways. “Why did God allow this?” And “What is the point of praying if God isn’t going to answer?”

These are natural questions. Vulnerable ones. And they aren’t easy to answer.

Most begin the Christian life energized — even euphoric — because of how they first experience the good news. Then reality bites. Life kicks the enthusiasm out of us and replaces it with unanswered questions that keep piling up. Why did this happen? When will this end?

Scripture is painfully honest about “the sufferings of this present time” (Rom 8:18), but when suffering arrives in our own lives, it still feels like something has gone wrong, terribly wrong. So we question, struggle, doubt, and feel guilty for all three.

It is easy to treat these responses to suffering as evidence of spiritual failure. Why can’t I just believe the way I used to? Why am I not stronger?

But our questions and groanings are not signs that our faith has faltered. They tell us less about faith’s weakness and more about the strange way Christians bear witness in a broken world.

From the groans of Israel in Egypt to the cries of Jesus in Gethsemane, suffering has marked God’s people like a family resemblance. And maybe that’s the point.

These groanings are not manifestations of weakness or spiritual regression but a form of Christian witness shaped by the hope of Christ coming. In other words: groaning is the sound faith makes this side of Advent.

Advent Groans

Advent is a season of longing, waiting, and hope. It teaches us to live honestly in the gap between promise and fulfillment. That may be why one of my favorite Advent songs isn’t a carol, it’s Counting Crows’ “A Long December”: “It’s been a long December, and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.” December is a month of reckoning, where people often look back, take stock, remember loss, and hope for something different. That longing sits at the heart of Advent.

In Romans 8, the Apostle Paul captures this longing better than anyone. He describes a creation that has been “subjected to futility in hope.” It’s an arresting phrase. We expect him to say “in punishment.” But hope? Yes — hope. Creation groans because it longs for something it has not yet become. And it isn’t only creation that groans. We groan. Even the Spirit groans within us (Rom 8:26).

Hope only exists where something is missing. As Paul notes, “One does not hope for what one sees” (Rom 8:24). If the world were already as God intends it to be, there would be no need for hope at all. But hope arises precisely because the future God has promised is not yet experienced in the present.

That all is not as it should, will, or was intended to be, does two things at once: it generates hope and it generates groaning.

In Paul’s apocalyptic vision, groaning is what faith sounds like after the Advent of Christ. It is the yearning of those who belong to the world to come and still live in the wreckage of the old. Once the future has come into view, the present is no longer felt the same way. This hope does not relieve the pain. If anything, it sharpens it.

A friend once told me about a conversation he had with his father. His parents divorced when he was young, and he and his dad have been somewhat distant ever since. Years later, sitting around a campfire, he finally asked his dad the questions he had buried for decades: Why weren’t you there more? Why didn’t you fight harder? Did you even miss me?

After a period of silence, his father spoke — about the empty table, the long nights imagining a bedtime routine he wasn’t part of, the birthdays recounted secondhand, and the pain he carried all those years. For the first time, my friend saw something he had never seen before: his dad hurt more because he saw more. His father realized, more than he even had been able to, the distance between what was and what should have been.

That is what Christian groaning sounds like. In Paul’s world, groaning is not a sign of spiritual immaturity. Groaning is participation in the age to come — the cry of people who have seen the light of Christ and can’t unsee it, even when the night grows long. The gospel unveils a new creation and, in the same moment, reveals how far we still are from home.

Which brings me back to the student’s questions. Her questions weren’t abstract or theoretical. It wasn’t really about prayer technique or theological explanations. What she was asking me was viscerally concrete: Where is God in this?

She wasn’t asking whether God exists. She was asking whether God could be found in the here and now of this broken world — inside unanswered prayer, inside fear, inside a grief that refused to resolve. She was asking whether God really does keep his promises and whether or not our prayers and hopes mean anything.

Where God Shows Up

The only way to answer the question of whether God keeps his promise is to look at how God has kept his promise in the sending of his Son.

Advent is not simply that God promises to come someday. It is that God comes — arrives yesterday, today, and on the great day. But Advent also teaches us that when God does arrive, he rarely does so in ways we would recognize.

“When the goodness and lovingkindness of God our Savior appeared…” (Titus 3:4), it did not look like power or privilege or protection from suffering. It looked like a baby born to a teenage mother on the margins of an empire.

Luke is unusually clear about this. The angel tells the shepherds, “This will be a sign for you” — as if to prepare them for something unmistakable. And then the sign is given: a baby, wrapped in cloth, lying in a manger.

Not triumph over enemies. Not resolution of every ambiguity. Not even relief from suffering. The sign is a helpless, poor, crying newborn. That is a strange sign of God’s presence and salvation. And when does the sign appear? When Mary is still marginalized, Joseph is still poor, and Rome is still ruling.

Luther had a name for this strange way of God’s working: sub contraria. By this, Luther meant that when God reveals himself, he often does so disguised in opposites. Strength hides inside weakness. Glory is cloaked as humiliation. God does not wait for darkness to clear before acting; he chooses to act within it.

And if Paul is right that the Spirit joins us “with groanings too deep for words,” then God does not silence our longing. He inhabits it (Rom 8:26).

“Where is God in this?” she asked me.

She couldn’t see God in that moment. I understood why. Nothing about her situation looked like answered prayer or divine intervention. Nothing about it looked like a sign.

But I could see God.

I could see him in her tears. In the longing and wrestling that refused to let God go without the blessing of his presence. In the fact that she was still crying out at all. Her groaning was not evidence of God’s absence. It was evidence that God had drawn near enough to be missed, trusted enough to be addressed.

That is what Advent trains us to recognize.

God often shows up not in the removal of the pain but in the place where the pain refuses to let us pretend everything is fine. God shows up in the empty chair at the Christmas table. In the phone that doesn’t ring. In the relationship that never healed. In the child who won’t call. In the parent who still cannot see us. God shows up in the whispering dissatisfaction that lingers after the carols end and the lights come down. Not because these things are good. But because God has chosen not to bypass them.

The Christ who came to us in weakness still comes this way — not when all is resolved, not once the prayers work, but right where they fail. He meets us where longing remains unanswered and faith sounds more like sigh than a song.

We do not groan our way past God. Nor are we left to groan alone. The Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words, and the Son who once lay in a manger still draws near where strength looks absent and glory seems concealed.

And there — where hope hurts, and prayers sound more like sighs than songs — our groaning becomes a strange communion with the God who came to us in weakness. And he comes to us still.