The Advent of Change: Week 1 — HOPE
The Advent of Change: Week 1 — HOPE
Stay Awake: When the Pain of Staying the Same Awakes the Desire to Become Who You Are
This Advent, I am offering a simple four-part series reflecting on Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. Each session is shared live inside the CatholicPsych Integrated Life App in the Advent of Change Group every Monday at 3 pm (EST).
For those who prefer to read quietly and reflect throughout the week, I am sharing each weekly meditation here.
Below is Week 1: HOPE — the beginning of our Advent journey.
The Word That Awakens Us
Advent always begins with a startling Gospel, Matthew 24:37–51. The Word awakens us. While our culture fills this season with lights and early holiday cheer, Jesus offers a different invitation:
“Stay awake… be ready.”
At first, His words sound unsettling. They remind us that life is fragile and not entirely in our control. But look closer. Jesus is not calling us into fear. He is calling us into hope.
He invites us to awaken
to His presence,
to our lives,
and to who we are meant to become.
St. John Paul II teaches that God speaks to each human person in the depth of their lived experience. Christ’s call to “stay awake” is an invitation to rediscover the truth of who we are.
Christ the Lord: The One Who Comes
Fr. John Bartunek, LC, reflects in his book The Better Part that Jesus speaks of three comings:
His first coming in the Incarnation
His continual coming in the Church and the sacraments
His final coming in glory
But there is also a fourth coming, one that is deeply personal: the moment Christ steps into our individual story and asks something of us.
These moments come quietly and unexpectedly. They interrupt. They invite. They awaken.
Jesus urges us to be ready, not to stir anxiety, but because His love refuses to let us drift through life asleep.
Christ the Teacher: Living with Intention
Jesus recalls ordinary life in the days of Noah. People were eating, drinking, marrying, working, unaware that something world-changing was approaching.
They were caught in the urgency of the moment and blind to the urgency of eternity.
The same happens to us. We get busy. We get distracted. We get emotionally overloaded. We drift into spiritual numbness.
And so Jesus asks with both urgency and tenderness:
What will you do with the time you have been given?
What truly matters?
What needs to change?
Not because time is short, but because time is sacred.
To stay awake is to live with intention, honesty, and awareness that God is truly here.
Christ the Friend: Longing for Us
Fr. Bartunek reminds us that the heart of Advent is not fear, but friendship.
Christ comes because He desires us.
He comes quietly in the Eucharist.
He comes gently in prayer.
He comes silently in our longing and our restlessness.
He comes through the people we love and even through loss.
Christ is always coming to us.
The real question is: Are we awake enough to notice?
St. John Paul II wrote, “Man cannot live without love.” Christ seeks us because our dignity is rooted in relationship.
Advent Week 1: Hope and the Grace of Waking Up
Hope begins the moment we stop sleepwalking.
Wakefulness is not hypervigilance. It is awareness. It is honesty, presence, and desire. It is the courage to look at our life and say:
“This is not working.”
“I want something different.”
“I want something more.”
“I want God.”
Hope is born when the pain of staying the same awakens the desire to become who we truly are.
The Interior Life We All Live
The Human Experience of Falling Asleep Inside
When Jesus says, “Stay awake,” He is not talking about physical tiredness. He is naming something interior, something universal: the tendency to fall asleep inside.
We get overwhelmed.
We push through.
We numb out.
We stay busy.
We drift into autopilot.
Life becomes something to manage, rather than something we inhabit.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), this is what our protective parts try to do. They help us cope with what feels too painful or uncertain to feel directly. They keep us functioning, surviving, moving.
And they work until they cannot anymore.
Eventually life brings a moment we did not plan for: a loss, an illness, a breakup, a transition, a disappointment. The strategies that once protected us begin to crack open. Not to harm us, but to wake us up.
The Pain of Staying the Same
Every person reaches a moment when the old way no longer works.
It may look like:
chronic stress
emotional exhaustion
irritability
anxiety
loneliness
emptiness
the quiet awareness that we are not living as we hoped
IFS describes this moment as the point when protectors are tired and the deeper parts of us, the exiles carrying pain, longing, or unmet needs, begin to surface.
This feels uncomfortable. It may feel like failure. It may feel like something is breaking. But spiritually and psychologically, something is actually beginning.
St. John Paul II’s personalism teaches that the human person is a unique, unrepeatable self whose dignity is revealed through lived experience. Our interior life, our desires and longings, is the sacred place where God meets us and invites us into deeper freedom.
“Staying awake” is not urgency or fear. It is returning to the truth of who we are.
Waking Up: Awareness, Honesty, and Desire
Psychologically, wakefulness begins with simple awareness:
noticing we are not okay
acknowledging misalignment
recognizing the emptiness we have been avoiding
slowing down enough to hear ourselves
letting uncomfortable truths surface
understanding the part of us that longs for more
Spiritually, this honesty becomes the soil where hope takes root.
Desire is not weakness. Desire is the mark of a person who longs for meaning, goodness, and relationship.
Advent as an Invitation to Internal Honesty
Advent is not a sentimental countdown to Christmas. It is a gentle summons to step out of autopilot and into truth.
It is the season to notice:
Where am I numb?
Where am I restless?
Where am I pretending?
Where am I longing for something deeper?
Where do I sense God stirring me awake?
Hope begins here, not in the fixing, but in the noticing.
This is the psychological meaning behind Jesus’s call:
“Stay awake.”
Stay awake to your life.
Stay awake to your story.
Stay awake to the parts that need attention.
Stay awake to the places where God is drawing you back to yourself.
When we become honest with ourselves, we become available to God.
The Story That Formed Me
When Heartbreak Wakes Us Up
In my early twenties, I was anything but awake. I was a cradle Catholic, but somewhere in college I drifted. By the time I moved to Manhattan, my faith had quietly slipped into the background.
From the outside, my life looked vibrant. Inside, I was sleepwalking.
And God was preparing a wake-up call I never would have chosen.
A Diagnosis That Changed Everything
My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in November. In December she had brain surgery. By March she was gone.
It was overwhelming and traumatic. And our relationship had been strained.
But underneath the grief, God was doing something.
Her Faith Became My Wake-Up Call
My mother’s faith was simple, steady, and unwavering. It pierced through my numbness.
She trusted God.
She surrendered to Him.
She radiated something I could not explain.
Through her suffering, Christ came for me. This was the “fourth coming” Fr. Bartunek describes. Christ enters a specific life at a specific moment with an invitation that cannot be ignored.
Her hope woke something in me.
Returning to a Faith I Had Abandoned
After her funeral, I returned to Manhattan. My office was next door to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a detail I had barely noticed before.
And suddenly I noticed.
I began slipping into the back pew after work. Sometimes to pray. Sometimes just to sit. Sometimes simply to breathe.
That cathedral became my refuge. It was where I softened, where I listened, where I slowly returned.
Her death awakened something that had been buried for years.
It woke me up.
Why This Matters for Advent
Everyone has a moment that wakes them up, a moment that breaks through autopilot and reveals what truly matters.
For me it was losing my mother.
For you it may be something else: a longing, a restlessness, a disappointment, a grief, or a quiet ache you cannot outrun.
But hidden in every heartbreak is an invitation:
Hope that something different is possible
Hope that God is already here
Hope that your story is not over
This moment was only the beginning of my formation. I will share more of these moments as we continue this Advent journey together.
Closing Reflection
Advent begins with a whisper, not a demand.
Christ does not shake us awake. He stirs us awake. He meets us in the places where we feel tired or restless and invites us to pay attention.
Hope begins in the noticing, in the honesty, in the simple courage to say, “Something in me is ready for change.”
You do not need a plan. You do not need to fix anything.
Just notice.
Notice where you feel numb.
Notice where you feel pulled.
Notice the longing that will not go away.
Notice the whisper you have been avoiding.
This is the holy ground of Advent, the place where Christ comes close enough for us to hear Him again.
So, I invite you to enter Week 1 quietly and honestly:
Where is God waking you up?
What truth is surfacing?
What part of your life is ready for grace?
Christ enters the real places: the ache and the desire, the questions and the hunger.
Let hope begin in awareness, in honesty, and in the willingness to stay awake to your own life.
My prayer is that this season becomes a sacred threshold for you, a time when Christ draws nearer than you expected and your heart opens to what the Holy Spirit desires to give.
Stay awake to the stirrings.
Stay awake to the longing.
Stay awake to the hope.
Christ is coming, and He is coming for you.
