Advent Devotional for 2025 | written November 20, 2025
Isaiah 11 1-10Ministry Call
Resumé
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Prayers and Poems
The Light We Make
Touch My Eyes Again
Prayers in Passing
The Thinnest Season
Let Me Bless the Borrowed Ride
The Great Litany
C Train To the Temple
If God answered my recent complaint as he had that of Jeremiah
Here in the potato bed,
the soil is colder than the air
and damp as held breath.
I dig, and the ground remembers:
worm twisting,
a weathered button,
my daughter’s lost toy...
the past rising
in clumps of soil.
Roots outlast what’s left above.
Cut-back things keep reaching.
I turn the soil; winter presses in.
There’s work to finish
before the earth locks itself in frost.
Hope begins like this —
the hidden dark where a seed breaks open.
The first Isaiah knew
a shoot from the stump,
a green insistence
rising through ruin.
He spoke to people aching for deliverance;
I kneel in my garden,
hands burning in the chill,
listening for that promise
in this stubborn earth.
On the deck,
the tomato vines still tangle,
pale fruit
summoned by a warm spell
too close to frost.
They look like hope,
but the fading light says otherwise.
Still, beneath the surface,
the earth draws in,
gathering strength
for the next beginning.
I clear around the horseradish,
stern, unmoved,
its white fingers driving through clay.
A root like this
knows endurance.
What is planted deep
outlasts the winter.
I pull down tired growth,
lay leaves back into soil,
edges curling like paper.
I set hard tomatoes on the sill,
the last light
warming their shoulders.
In this thinnest season
I trust the slow work of God —
hope rooting itself quietly,
the first small promise
clinging to the cold.
For now, the garden lies still,
each low thing resting easy
beside the next.