When you send me a link for a personality survey, I’m likely going to take the survey. Not only are these surveys excellent procrastination tools but I do find many of them valuable in understanding myself better.

Recently I’ve had the mandated opportunity to take at least 4 personality surveys. These ranged from Meyers Briggs to leadership personality and many things in between.

Most of the time I can pretty much gauge what the results are going to be (I wonder if there’s a survey that predicts that…). I like to think that I have pretty good self-awareness and have spent time listening to myself and others about how I relate and function as an individual and as a team.

This moat recent survey, however, left me feeling slightly dissatisfied. My results pointed to the fact that when in leadership structures, I tend to look at the effect decisions will have on people (good thing, I think) and my focus i mainly on what this decision will mean long-term.

There’s nothing wrong in that but I started thinking about the balance between the here and now and the yet to come.

My reading and study this week is in the book of Isaiah, specifically on the Servant Songs in the latter part of the book. The people of Israel encounter incredible hardship in their current situation and receive the promise through prophecy of the coming Messiah. This promise of one day restoration that leaves them clinging to hope as they endure exile and separation from the seat of their worship.

The Israelites were looking long-term, for the coming Messiah and the knowledge that what was taken would be restored and what was broken would be healed.

Advent is a time of longing, a time of expectation and hope as we follow the journey of prophecy and promise towards celebrating our Savior’s birth. We look forward.

We look forward not only to the celebration and rejoicing of what God has done through Jesus as Immanuel, we also look beyond the manger to the Coming King and our own hope of restoration.

This is where I look, the place where I meditate and live as Christmas draws near. But what might I be missing if my nature is to focus on the what-will-be rather than the what-is-now?

The Israelites looked forward into the promise of Messiah but their daily lives may have looked little like they had ever hoped or imagined. How did they live daily into the promise but also live out their lives in their current situation as people of God?

Expectation meets action as we seek God’s heart in Advent.

As I look around me, where can I be proclaiming and living out salt and light to my closest, to strangers, and to everyone in between?

What does helping others live into the Incarnation promise look like? Does it look like healing and wholeness is a to-come hope we share together? Or does it look like capturing in our hearts and minds and actions what it means to see his Kingdom come here on Earth, right now?

My goal this Advent season is to stretch. To alternate my spiritual glances from the yet-to-come that fills my heart with excitement, to looking beside me for ways I can breathe encouragement and love and help to those I journey with in this life. To check in with those who are grieving. To help those who are wounded in body and soul. To sit with the lonely and discouraged. Realizing that my focus needs to not be single-minded, but Kingdom minded.

And to rejoice in Jesus’s presence with us. That he came, that he is here in Spirit and in Truth, and that he is coming again.