For the full 29 days you can go here.
5 Five Lessons from Advent:
1) Hope is as much about the past as the future. Looking backward to the story of what has happened so far, and learning to do that well, is a a practice of keeping hope. Hope isn’t always a surprise, especially where you know where to look.
2) Hope is not optimism. Having hope doesn’t mean everything will go like we want to. It means we are going to be ok and the story will keep moving forward even if it all falls apart.
3) Hope is not a choice. Hope for
St Thomas Aquinas, an expert on the matter, is a virtue. This means it has practices that are required to develop it and sustain it. We are formed into it.
4) The first signs of hope arrive in the least likely. The Shepherds for instance had the least amount of power and the least reasons to have hope in how the world was unfolding. Un-showered poor people who spend most the day chasing not-so-smart animals are more audacious than so called movers and shakers. Who are the
shepherds of today?
5) Hope is not about me. That is to say, hope grows fasest when I realize I am part of a much larger story than my own. There are shepherds in my life. There are misfits, lousy joiners and other homesick souls and I can do something to arouse hope in them. I can care.
I think the practices of Advent help me to suspend some of my expectations so that I can receive new ones about what is really going on in the world. And in my tradition it isn’t even sub-text. It is text.
some of what you bring to relationships and how you contribute to the world. But of course there is other the other side of the coin. Some of us live in constant if not overwhelming fear that it is our weakness, our darkness that comes through, or is at least just below the surface. Here is why that is not a problem… 
