How Advent Gives Us a Second Chance

Being "made new" like the Grinch?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, back home in Montana with my family, we were flipping through channels at my grandparents’ house and found the animated classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It had probably been six or eight years since I’d seen it, and something caught my eye that had never presented itself before: that the turning point of the whole story was, in essence, a sudden and profound conversion—a being made new—such that the Grinch’s former self became unrecognizable in light of a heart that “grew three sizes that day.”

It’s funny, because “making all things new” is really the point of the entirety of Salvation History, is it not? As cheesy as it sounds, the Grinch can be a symbol of both humanity at Christ’s coming, as well as each one of us as we oscillate between times of selfishness and pride and times of humility and self-gift.

The crumbling of my marriage and subsequent divorce revealed just how newly made I needed to be.

With Advent upon us, this “being made new” particularly resonated with me given my own life situation—relatively recently I received a decree of nullity following a short marriage and divorce, and am now engaged to be married anew in March. The first marriage, in short, never should have taken place (sacramentally speaking, of course, it never did). It ended mercifully without children, and the split itself was free of contention, but the immediate and not-so-immediate aftermath of both the separation and divorce were still painful, especially when it came to working through my own negligence, wounds, and blind spots that caused such a thing to happen.

In particular, my greatest negligence was treating marriage like an idol, and my greatest wound was not knowing the Father’s literally unconditional love for me. That cocktail resulted, to keep a long story very short, in me seeing life’s little (and big) imperfections and anxieties merely in black and white, which caused a vast ignorance on my part to the actual needs and desires of my spouse and myself.

Despite deserving condemnation and desolation, Jesus gave me consolation.

Imagine my surprise, then, that when all of this began to sink in immediately after the separation, it wasn’t a condemning desolation (which I was confident that I deserved) but instead a profound consolation from the Lord. What kicked it all off was one of the single most grace-filled and strange moments of my life—as I sat on the stairs in my new apartment, feeling utterly alone, ashamed, and humiliated, it was as if the Father whispered to me ever so softly, “Are you ready to surrender for real now?”

Was I ready to be made new?

It was this single encounter with the Father which proved to be the catalyst for many more opportunities to face my own woundedness and ask the Lord for healing in the months thereafter. After that, the story of the Prodigal Son seemed to follow me around everywhere I went—a conference speaker gave a talk on it, the book Be Healed talked about it at length, it cropped up in the Mass readings—and I grew to know the Father’s love, really, for the first time in my life. And the strangest part? Somehow the lowest point in my life suddenly also became the most joyful.

Advent offers everyone a second chance, a chance to be made new through a literal birth.

Now, it becomes clearer every day that the Lord has given me a second chance at marriage and through it, offered me the grace to heal from past wounds which had left me blind to my mistakes. It also (more importantly, I would say) allowed me afterward to clarify the true desires of my heart—like a restored stained glass window, glimmering anew in the filtered sunlight, after years of built-up grime has been washed away.

For me, the thread which ran through this whole experience boiled down to this: If our wills are aligned with the Father’s, then our requests will be the very things He’s been waiting to grant us, if only we would ask. The Father wants nothing more for us than to be healed, to be unbroken, to be made new.

Advent, for the people of God, is a second chance. It’s a literal “making all things new,” offered to us through the coming of a King. Through Jesus we are saved, and it’s through joyfully preparing His way in the Advent season that we allow Him to help our hearts “grow three sizes.”

So, this Advent, may these verses from St. Peter’s first letter be our prayer:

“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that in due time he may exalt you. Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you.”