Something Is Coming
by Donavon L Riley

Advent comes like the slow drawing of night, and no one escapes it. Not the believer, not the skeptic, not even the one who mocks it all as myth. Advent is deeper than creed; it is woven into the soil and sky, into the way the earth leans toward winter, into the way our own hearts grow restless in the cold. The non-believer, too, must reckon with this gathering darkness. The absence of faith? That is its own Advent. Nihilism is no escape. It is a nightfall with no lantern, a crossing through shadows where the stars refuse to sing. Even atheism, that fierce denial, cannot stop the ancient rhythm. There is no immunity from longing, no shelter from the winter of the soul.

This darkness, though, is not passive; it presses inward, demanding a reckoning. It insists on honesty, an unflinching endurance of what seems unbearable. There’s no shortcut, no clever philosophy to sidestep the weight of it. Advent, whether lit by candles or haunted by doubt, insists that something is coming. Even the most hardened nihilist feels it—a stirring beneath the surface, a tremor in the quiet. In the empty rooms of disbelief, there’s still the faintest whisper that a birth is imminent, the ache that something significant is about to happen that even nothingness cannot entirely silence.

Surely, it is the nature of darkness to hold its breath, waiting for revelation to shatter it. It is the law of the night to bend toward dawn. But the question remains: Will we meet what’s coming, or will we turn away, clinging to the dim comfort of the void? Advent is not just the season of expectation; it is the confrontation with all we refuse to face about higher truth. The Light does not come cheaply. He breaks us open, reshapes us. He demands that we relinquish the safe walls of despair, the illusion that life without higher heavenly meaning is somehow easier to bear.

Advent is the answer to every form of spiritual dryness, every season of wandering in the wilderness of self. God draws the map of exile, not to condemn us, but to bring us back home. The darkness is not the end, nor is it to be feared, but it must be passed through. This is the truth that Advent whispers: the path of longing is carved out by the sacred. Even in nihilism, there is a strange fidelity—a recognition that the hunger for meaning, though unsatisfied, still exists. That hunger is the Advent of something beyond us, something heavenly, someone is coming, whether we acknowledge it’s the Savior of the world or not.

In the quiet of this season, whether you light the candles of tradition or sit in the hollow ache of disbelief, the message remains the same. Something is coming. Not of your making, not of your choosing, but something older than time itself, surging through the seams of creation. Advent is not just a waiting; it is a calling, a trembling in the night that demands we listen. Will we dare to open the door, to let the Light pierce through the dark corners of our doubt? Or will we remain in the silence, clutching the void, unwilling to believe that surely, some revelation of divine intent is at hand?