Introduction
Slowing Down to Savor the Mystery
I am a big fan of Mary— as in the mother of God. I’m not unique. After all, much of this world is devoted to Mary, whether their devotion is an admiration or a full-fledged rosary habit. For this Protestant ex-evangelical from Texas, my attachment to the mother of Jesus began the first time I dressed as her and held a baby doll for the church photographer in my preschool Sunday school class. I was a little girl with a longing to serve God in a Southern Baptist church, where women’s roles in leadership were relegated to the nurture of children, the teaching of other women, and the support of husbands. I wanted to pass the offering plate, pray the prayers everyone else bowed their heads to. I wanted to preach. I didn’t know how to reconcile that longing with our church’s sanctuary of stained-glass images of men. But December would arrive, and suddenly Mary, who never graced a stained-glass window in my church, appeared in our stories, songs, and prayers. Once a year, we read her poem of worship, her call for a rebalance of power. Every Christmas, she was the focus of our shared story: nurturing and faithful, a subversive saint with the voice of a poet. She was mine.
Mary’s posture of courage, consent, and slow transformation has rightfully driven the story of Christ’s birth for two millennia as Christians have told and retold the narrative. Mary said yes to an invitation that changed her and the world. And, like Mary, we are invited in this season to practice giving our consent to the Spirit of God, even when it means risking everything. This book invites us to slow down enough to notice God at work in and around us and, like Mary, choose to live in the mystery.
What are you invited to say yes to this Advent? Perhaps you picked up this book because you saw that word unhurried in the title and thought, That’s what I want. If so, here’s some good news and bad news: Good news? The weeks leading up to Christmas can be meaningful, generous, and nonanxious. The bad news? I’m no life-edit expert or self-help guru. I’m not here with a new system for organization or a plan to streamline your December. But I can offer you a rhythm to return to each day this Advent. I can offer you practices that make space to pay attention to the wonder beneath the external expectations of the season. Usually what we need more than a life hack is spaciousness, the time and intentionality to breathe and reflect.
We all long to make this season meaningful, to find some way to push back on the most chronically chaotic few weeks of the year. How can we remember who we are and who God is when our days are spent frantically shopping, baking cookies, attending parties, and sitting through the kids’ performances? And, perhaps most important, who do we want to be when Christmas Day arrives?
As Annie Dillard so wisely said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” (1) An unhurried Advent doesn’t demand that we drop the baking, shopping, or performance attending. What matters is the posture of our souls. We can move through the demanding expectations of the season with a peaceful presence or with a frenetic energy. And what we choose will determine who we are when we finally join the people we love around the tree in four weeks.
This book is an opportunity to bring the story of Christmas into your daily rhythm this December. It’s a gentle nudge to slow down enough not only to reflect on the cosmic event of Christmas but also to invite that story to affect the way you spend time with the people you love, how you play and work and rest for the next four weeks. Engaging with the story of Christ’s birth begins with slowing down enough to notice it.
Years ago, the Christian contemplative Ruth Haley Barton wrote of an encounter with a spiritual director who said to her, “Ruth, you are like a jar of river water all shaken up. What you need is to sit still long enough so that the sediment can settle and the water can become clear.” (2) While the chaos of this season may leave us feeling murky, our inner selves don’t have to accept the unsettled state of our souls. It takes only a bit of silence and stillness to clarify the sediment of our overworked and overfilled days. We need space for God to do good work.
WEEK ONE
HOPE
Hope . . . has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality
at every turn and reveres truth. . . . Hope, like every virtue, is
a choice. —Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise
DAY 1
Hope Begins with Looking Up
The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.” — Luke 1:28–30
On December 12, 2022, almost one year after my dad passed away, I lay on an exam table on a frigid day in New Jersey in a hospital gown while the breast specialist cut into my body. Two days later, I flew back to my hometown to spend the anniversary of my dad’s death with my mom, siblings, nieces, and nephews. I didn’t tell my mom that my breast was bandaged, that tissue had been extracted, that I was waiting to learn if I, too, had cancer, one year after cancer had taken my dad.
Instead, my mom and I went Christmas shopping. We planned a family dinner— pizza and banana pudding— my dad’s favorites. And I lived in the in-between for those few days, waiting. In every shop, Bing Crosby and Amy Grant crooned on repeat, and at night my hometown lit up. But in those early weeks of Advent, I felt much closer to sorrow than to hope.
I thought often of Mary’s annunciation story, the words the angel speaks to her in the first chapter of Luke. She is called the “highly favored” one, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t unsettled by God’s messenger. I know what it is to feel disquieted, to carry in my center a bodily vibration of anxiety, the kind you can’t shake by shopping or chatting or ticking tasks off a to- do list. That week as I grieved my dad and waited for my diagnosis, I wasn’t moved at the thought of angel choruses or shepherds keeping watch in the fields. I didn’t meditate on wise men arriving with gifts. But I did find myself returning again and again to Mary: trembling at the sight of the angel, struggling through morning sickness alone, learning to embrace the news that would certainly change her life.
The Scripture readings for the first week of Advent always surprise me. Those of us who show up at any liturgical church the Sunday after Thanksgiving may find that the Scripture reading doesn’t quite fit the mood of the Target where we just spent the past day snagging deals. (Or, if we’re not that into Black Friday sales, the Hallmark Christmas movies we’ve been bingeing all weekend.) In fact, if we come to church straight out of Thanksgiving expecting an on-ramp to good cheer, we just might find that the first week of Advent is instead pointing us to some of Jesus’s hardest sayings. No babies or cows in stables. Only apocalypse.
1. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper & Row, 1989), 32.
2. Ruth Haley Barton, “Make a Joyful Silence,” Sojourners 38, no. 2 (February 2009): 32.
Content taken from Advent Unhurried by Micha Boyett, ©2026. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
