Love

The Love That Comes All the Way Down

Love is not the last candle because it is the strongest.
It is the last because it is the lowest.

Hope lifts our eyes.
Peace stills our fear.
Joy surprises us in the dust.
But Love—
Love comes all the way down.

We often speak of love as something we are meant to rise into:
to become better, kinder, more patient, more holy.
But Advent tells a different story.

Love does not wait for us to ascend.
Love descends.

The child in the manger is not God’s strategy.
He is God’s confession.

That Love would rather be near than impressive.
That it would rather be vulnerable than distant.
That it would rather be born into the mess
than admired from the heavens.

This is not love as sentiment.
It is love as surrender.

God does not stand above the world offering affection from afar.
He enters it.
He breathes our air.
He receives our limits.
He accepts our misunderstanding, our rejection, our violence—
and does not withdraw.

Love stays.

The final candle does not shine brighter because the world has improved.
It shines because Love has decided to remain
even when the world does not recognize Him.

This is the scandal of Christmas:
Love does not fix us before joining us.
Love joins us in order to raise us.

We imagine love as something that demands response.
But divine Love arrives first—
before belief,
before repentance,
before understanding.

“While we were still…”
God came.

And this is why Advent ends here.
Not with resolution,
not with answers,
not with certainty—
but with Presence.

Love does not explain suffering.
Love enters it.

Love does not shout over fear.
Love sits beside it.

Love does not hurry transformation.
Love abides until resurrection happens from within.

The manger is not the beginning of a story.
It is the revelation of God’s heart.

A heart that chooses closeness over control.
A heart that trusts incarnation more than instruction.
A heart that believes love itself is enough.

And so the final candle burns quietly.

Not to demand anything of you.
But to remind you:

You were never waiting for Love.
Love was always coming for you.

Closing Prayer / Benediction

Sit still.

The Love you long for
has already arrived.

Not to change you from afar,
but to dwell within you.

Let it remain.