Third Sunday in Advent
READING: Isaiah 35

The Heart of Advent Hope:

When the Weather Finally Lifts

Anyone who has ever been lost in the mountains knows how quickly confidence collapses. The weather turns; mist slides over the ridgeline; familiar paths vanish in an instant. One moment you are walking easily, taking in the magnificent landscape; the next, you can hardly see your own hand in front of your face. You count breaths. You freeze mid-step, fearing what lies beneath your feet. The cold tightens around your fingers; your chest feels heavy; your mind races through what you should do when visibility disappears and the world closes in. It was ever thus in the mountains of North Wales – and so it is in the mountains we carry inside ourselves.

There are seasons when life feels like that: illness that drags on, bereavement that hollows everything out, relationships that end, disappointments that arrive in waves, or simply a long stretch of not knowing what comes next. You don’t know how long the wilderness will last. You only pray for the moment the weather might lift.

And then – sometimes gradually, sometimes in one astonishing breath – the mist begins to thin. A patch of sky appears. A path you thought you’d lost re-emerges. A line of trees becomes visible where a moment before there was only white. You may not be safe yet, but you can see again. The landscape is still harsh, but the promise of home rises like a quiet flame.

Isaiah 35 speaks directly into this experience. It is a poem written for people who know what it is to feel lost, afraid, or pushed to the edge. Isaiah begins not by denying the wilderness, but by offering a startling vision of what God can do within it. “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” he says. Hope begins in the very place that felt beyond hope. The desert bursts into bloom; the dry land sings. Before any human being rejoices, creation itself rejoices. Advent hope, Isaiah insists, starts precisely where life feels barren. The places we had written off as dead become the first to feel God’s touch of renewal.

And then comes one of Scripture’s most tender invitations: “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.” Advent does not ask us to pretend. It does not require us to be strong. Instead, it shows us God turning toward the vulnerable – in ourselves, in each other, and in creation — and teaching us to do the same. Isaiah’s words acknowledge what wilderness does to the body and the spirit. Hands weaken under strain; knees tremble under worry. In times of illness, depression, grief, or exhaustion, strength ebbs slowly. And Isaiah’s response is pastoral: not “be strong,” but “let us help steady you until strength returns.”

Even the passage’s language of “vengeance” is not divine cruelty but divine justice — God acting to dismantle what crushes the weak and to restore dignity where it has been stripped away. God’s “recompense” is restoration: the putting-right of what has long been wrong.

Isaiah then widens the vision again. The blind see; the deaf hear; the lame leap; the speechless sing. These are not simply descriptions of physical healing but signs of a whole world being made new. It is the restoration of agency, voice, mobility, joy. It is the lifting of shame. It is the undoing of systems and experiences that silence or diminish people. Isaiah imagines a world in which those who have suffered long are brought into fullness again.

And then the water begins to flow. “Waters shall break forth in the wilderness.” This is Advent’s deepest metaphor. God creates space where we thought none existed. The impossible becomes possible. Joy breaks through like a spring forcing its way up through rock.

For anyone undergoing cancer treatment, this imagery may feel painfully familiar. There is the long wilderness of waiting rooms, appointments, exhaustion, and fear. There are days when the mist is thick and the future feels unclear. But there are also moments when the weather lifts: when the scan shows progress, when the doctor’s smile carries unexpected hope, when the final chemo session ends and the bell is rung — a sound as clear and bright as Isaiah’s promise that “sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” These moments don’t erase the wilderness, but they mark the first drops of water in a dry land.

Finally, Isaiah imagines a road – a Holy Way – stretching through the desert. It is not a narrow path for the pure or the perfect, but a wide and safe road where “no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray.” It is a road without predators, without fear, without shame. It is a way home for people who have been in exile, whether exile of the body, the heart, or the spirit. This is one of Scripture’s most profoundly inclusive visions: everyone can walk this road. Everyone belongs on it. No one is left behind.

The vision ends in joy. Not cheap cheerfulness or denial, but joy born from survival, from healing, from the lifting of grief, from the discovery that God has been quietly restoring the world from the inside out. Advent hope is not naïve optimism. It is the deep assurance that God is at work even when the path is obscured, even when we feel lost, even when our knees tremble and our hands shake.

This is the heart of Advent:
a God who begins in the wilderness rather than avoiding it;
a God who strengthens rather than shames;
a God who brings renewal where we imagined only desolation;
a God who leads us home by joy, not coercion.

And so, even after long seasons of harsh landscape, the weather will lift. Light will return. And we will find ourselves walking a path we could not see before – guided by the God who never gave up on us.

Photo Credit: Daniel Mirlea (Unsplash.com)