Advent Lessons from a Half-Finished Home

It’s Monday. Monday morning. In December. With her early darkness and her calling to me to slow down. That kind of December energy invites us into a different kind of noticing. Noticing the cold, and the crunch of the snow as I walk the dog. Noticing the way the kids throw themselves into the snow during recess. Noticing the lights and the music and the people, both the weary and the expectant. This is Advent. It’s the season of expectancy, of waiting for light to return, of preparing room for what’s yet to come. And this year, more than any other, I feel Advent in my bones.

Maybe it’s because we’ve spent months living in the in-between, the half-done, the almost-there-but-not-quite. Renovation has a strange way of mirroring life: the mess arrives long before the beauty, the dismantling happens all at once, and the rebuilding unfolds slowly, often with long stretches of uncertainty in between. And in that waiting, in the garage-turned-living-room, on the patio furniture that became our couch, I’ve felt the ache and the longing of Advent more acutely than ever.

Advent is the promise that light returns.
Renovation is the promise that home does too.

For a long time now, our house hasn’t fully felt like ours. Every day I’ve walked past cabinets without doors and exposed subfloor, a sink with no faucet, and boxes of fixtures waiting for their turn. Every morning I’ve made my coffee in the garage and wrapped myself in a blanket against the cold. And some mornings, I’ve wondered if the waiting would ever end, or if this was simply how life would be now, suspended between what was, what was supposed to be, and what could be.

But Advent teaches us something about waiting: it is not passive. It is not powerless.
Waiting can be active. Waiting can be intentional. Waiting can be a declaration of hope.

And this week, for the first time in months, the waiting shifted. A small change, but one that cracked open something inside me:

Our floors go in next week.

It’s funny how one update, one sentence, can feel like an entire sunrise. I’ve said it out loud to myself, to Nancee, to the kids, to anyone who will listen. The dogs don’t understand a word of it, but even they can feel the lifting energy in the house.

Floors are foundational. They are grounding. They are the physical moment when a house turns back toward becoming a home. To me, they feel like Advent embodied: light returning after a long night. Hope stepping forward after months of holding its breath.

But this isn’t just about flooring. It’s about agency.
It’s about choosing how to move forward when the road behind you has been confusing and heavy.
It’s about remembering that even in seasons when trust breaks and circumstances wobble, you still have the right, and the ability, to reclaim your power.

Advent has a quiet courage to it.
A courage that doesn’t roar, but whispers.
A courage that says, “Prepare the way. Something good is coming. Keep going.”

This season has taught me more about that kind of courage than I ever expected to learn. There were moments when I felt small and unsure in my own renovation, where decisions felt like they were not mine, where the uncertainty of it all made even the simplest next step feel overwhelming. But Advent reminds us that clarity doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes candle by candle, step by step.

The first week: hope.
The second: peace.
The third: joy.
The fourth: love.

Each one its own small flame pushing back the darkness.

And somewhere along the way, a flame inside me has reignited. I realized I didn’t have to feel powerless. I don’t have to wait for someone else to decide the next chapter. I can take back my agency, choose the people who would walk through my door, choose the direction of this work, choose how we move forward from here.

That realization didn’t arrive dramatically. It arrived quietly, like Advent light, steady, understated, but unmistakable. Once I felt it, I couldn’t unfeel it. And everything began to shift.

Taking back your agency isn’t about force or control. It isn’t about pushing harder. It’s about remembering who we are and what we deserve. It’s about aligning our choices with truth and clarity. It’s about saying, “I get to participate in my own restoration.”

Maybe that’s the part that connects most deeply to Advent: the idea that renewal is both divine and deeply human. Light comes, yes, but we choose to open the shutters. Hope returns, but we decide to let it in.

As we step into this next phase, as the floors are laid, as the rooms start to look like themselves again, I feel something rising in me that I haven’t felt in a long time: anticipation. Holy anticipation. The kind that Advent is built on.

Not because everything is fixed or finished.
Not because the hard parts have vanished. They have not.
But because the direction is finally forward, and I can feel the shape of home returning around us.

In a strange way, this renovation has become its own Advent story. It has taught me to wait, but not passively. To hope, but not naively. To prepare, even when I wasn’t sure what I was preparing for. To trust that light, and home, return, even when the waiting feels endless.

And perhaps most importantly, it has taught me that the story isn’t done until we say it is.
That we get to choose how we rise from here.
That agency is not given, it’s claimed.

So this year, as the candles are lit one by one and the world leans toward Christmas, I am leaning too, not just toward the season, but toward a renewed sense of myself. A steadier strength. A quieter confidence. A homecoming that is both literal and deeply internal.

The floors are coming.
The house is shifting.
And so am I.

This is my Advent.
A season of rebuilding.
A season of reclamation.
A season of light returning, slowly but surely, to the places that needed it most.

And when Christmas finally arrives, when the tree eventually stands where it belongs, when the kitchen glows warm with gathering again, it will not just mark the end of a renovation, but the culmination of a journey. A journey of waiting with intention. Waiting with hope. Waiting with agency.

Because the story of our home is being written again.
And this time, I’m holding the pen.