Chase The Kangaroo

Love Comes Close

Love does not announce itself with volume.

By the fourth week of Advent, time feels compressed. Christmas is close now. From its earliest practice, Advent was never meant to linger comfortably. It was a season of watchfulness and preparation, often brief, often austere, designed to sharpen longing rather than satisfy it. This is the final week of waiting, though not the final word of the season. What arrives does not end the journey. It begins it.

By now, most of the noise has already peaked. Plans are in place. Expectations have been named. The world feels full, crowded, loud. And yet Advent insists that love arrives without spectacle.

A child.
A borrowed room.
A quiet, costly yes.

Love does not wait for ideal conditions. It does not ask for certainty before committing. Love moves first. It comes close.

As Saint Augustine put it, “He loved us first, and in loving us, made us lovable.”

This is the order Advent insists on. Love does not begin with our readiness or resolve. It begins with God’s decision to draw near. Before we act, before we respond, before we understand, love has already crossed the distance.

We tend to treat love as a feeling we fall into, something warm and affirming, something that arrives once everything else is settled. Advent tells a harder and truer story. Love is not the reward at the end of the journey. Love is the decision to take the journey at all.

God does not send instructions.
He sends Himself.

That is the scandal of the season. Love crosses distance. Love enters risk. Love chooses vulnerability over safety. Not because it guarantees success, but because presence matters more than control.

Love is not abstract here. It has breath. It cries. It needs tending.
And that is where Advent presses on us.

If love looks like this, it cannot remain theoretical. It demands something embodied. Something inconvenient. Something practiced.

Love shows up when it would be easier to withdraw.
Love listens when silence would be safer.
Love stays when leaving would cost less.

This is not about grand gestures. It rarely is. It is about proximity. Attention. Fidelity in small, ordinary places.

The fourth candle does not blaze brighter than the others. It burns steadily. It says: This is what love does. It remains.

As Christmas approaches, Advent asks one final question before the door opens fully:

Where are you willing to draw near?

Not with answers. Not with fixes. With presence.

Because love does not solve everything as we see it.

But it refuses to abandon what matters.

And that is enough to change the world.