A Surrendered December:When life moves fast
When December Starts Moving Fast
The first day of December always feels like stepping onto a treadmill that’s already running.
You’re trying to ease in…
but the month moves faster than your hands can find the rails.
School papers. Work deadlines. Christmas lists you forgot you started.
And somewhere in all of it, this whispered pressure to slow down and savor the season.
Right?
So this year, before the pace carries me, I opened to Luke 1.
Tucked into this familiar story of Jesus’ coming is also the story of people standing in the middle—a waiting season. In between certainty and surrender.
A place many of us know well.
Stepping Into the Story: A Look at Luke 1
By the time Luke begins, God’s people have lived through four hundred years without a fresh word from Him.
No prophets. No visions. No angelic surprises.
And then suddenly, everything shifts.
Gabriel appears to Zechariah—an aging priest—and tells him that he and Elizabeth (also well on in years) will have a son. Not just any son, but the one who will prepare the way for the Messiah they’ve been waiting for.
Soon after, Gabriel visits Mary, a young girl in Nazareth, bringing a promise that feels impossible: she will carry the Messiah by the power of the Holy Spirit. And she will name Him Jesus.
Two people.
Two impossible promises.
Two questions of the promise.
Two Questions, Two Postures
Zechariah asks,
“How can I be sure?” (Luke 1:18)
Mary asks,
“How will this be?” (Luke 1:34)
Their words sound nearly the same, but their hearts lean in different directions.
Zechariah longs for certainty.
Something solid to hold.
Mary leans toward trust.
She believes—she just doesn’t understand the “how.”
One reaches for control.
The other opens her hands.
Both understandable responses.
Both are met with God’s kindness.
How God Meets Us in the Middle
What steadies me most in this chapter is God’s kindness toward both of them.
Zechariah receives a sign—silence.
Nine long months of it.
And this silence wasn’t punishment so much as preparation.
He was a priest—a man who prayed, taught, and guided God’s people with his voice.
And yet, in a season of waiting, God does His forming work in Zechariah not through speaking…but through stillness.
Sometimes what feels like withholding is actually God slowing us just long enough for Him to reshape our hearts in the waiting.
Mary’s story takes a different shape.
Pregnant with a promise she didn’t fully understand, she goes straight to Elizabeth—
not to just anyone, but to someone who could hold the weight of her promise with her.
Her surrender creates space for God to break through.
And in that waiting place, surrounded by someone who also carried a miracle, Mary’s trust grows into worship.
Why This Matters for December
Advent is, at its core, a season of waiting—
the quiet tension between promise and fulfillment.
Exactly where Zechariah and Mary stood.
Exactly where many of us stand every December.
Because December exposes so much in us:
our need for control,
our fear of the unknown,
our craving for certainty,
our resistance to interruption.
But Advent gently shifts the question.
Not “Do you understand everything?”
but “Will you trust the One who does?”
A Simple Advent Invitation
So as this first week of December settles in, I’m asking myself:
Am I reaching for certainty…or holding on to hope.
Am I asking for courage to walk with God even when I can’t yet see the whole story?
Mary didn’t understand every detail.
She simply trusted the One holding it all.
Maybe that’s our invitation this Advent—
not a perfectly slow month,
not a flawlessly peaceful calendar,
not a December without questions…
Just a surrendered posture that whispers,
“I am Yours. Do what You will.”
A surrendered December.
Not perfect.
Just a month where waiting becomes worship—
and where our questions draw us closer to Jesus,
the One who is still Emmanuel,
still God with us,
still present in the parts of the story we can’t yet see.
