The word “Advent” might mean “to come,” but this season feels like it’s all about waiting. I recall as a kid, waiting for Christmas, waiting for the decorations, waiting for the tree, waiting for our stockings, waiting for Santa. Eternal waiting.

Advent says that we know what we’re waiting for. The coming of God’s Son. The ultimate proof of God’s love for us. The One who showed us in His coming how we are all the children of God.

As I write this, my wife and I eagerly await the arrival of a second grandson due any day now. (By the time you read this, that baby might be here on earth cradled in his mother’s arms.)

The thing about having children is that you never know exactly what to expect. The doctors can tell you whether it’s a boy or a girl. You can see in a sonogram what that baby in the womb looks like. You can think of what you were like as a kid and project all sorts of expectations.

But there’s no telling how that baby will turn out. My wife and I are both writers. Word people. Who would have guessed that our eldest son, William, would be such a math whiz? Where did that come from?

In high school our second son, Timothy, looked like he’d be a rock star. He had the hair for it. And the demeanor. Who would have guessed that he would hear a call for the ministry and is now attending seminary?

Well, maybe there were hints. One of his favorite Bible verses as a kid was “I am the alpha and omega…” a reference to first and last letters in the Greek alphabet (Revelation 21:6). He’d ask me to read it to him from my Bible.

These days he tells me what he’s learned in his Greek class, translations of some of the original Greek from the gospels. 

The angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her what she should expect. “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” (Luke 1:31-33)

If you heard words like that, wouldn’t you be ready to put on your fancy clothes? Wouldn’t you expect your child to live in a castle, wear a crown and sit on a throne? Mary didn’t know yet what kind of kingdom her Son would bring.

All of this is to say, my prayers at Advent are ones of expectation. Something’s coming. Something big, something bigger than I could ever guess. I wait and I pray.

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This Thursday is National Day of Prayer, and prodded by Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion, I figured I’d look up John Winthrop’s famous sermon “City Upon a Hill,” so often mentioned in politicians’ visions of America.

Winthrop was one of the leading Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and on his trip over from England he wrote a template of his hopes for the settlement. It’s short, succinct, steeped in Scripture and has inspired many claimants to say that America has been that spiritual exemplar, that shining city on the hill, ever since.

But this is what Douthat reminded me, and what colors any of my own prayers for America: that when Winthrop used his now famous phrase, it was as a warning. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” he wrote, “the eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world …”

We’re not that city upon a hill by claim or proxy but by our dealings with God, and if we botch those up we’re not much; in fact, we could become a laughingstock. He might have said, don’t just assume God is on your side unless you’re working hard to make sure you’re on God’s side.

Winthrop prospered in America and served as the struggling colony’s governor 12 times. In one poignant glimpse of his private life, his biographers explain how his wife (his third of four) waited a year before she followed him because she was pregnant. For the period of separation they agreed, in that pre-cell-phone pre-email era, to dedicate the hour between five and six in the evening on Monday and Friday to think of each other. I like to think they thought of each other at other times too.

A part of Winthrop’s sermon that doesn’t often get quoted is the opening, written as though in mid-thought: “Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, walk humbly with our God.”

That I’m writing this today, almost 400 years later, must mean that those Puritans and all us who have followed got something right. The counsel of Micah is pretty good … and so was Winthrop’s.