Warning: Roadwork Ahead

The long stretch of road from the subdivision where I live to the main city road that I use daily was under repair for most of the year. The repair work began before the last elections. The work was completed a few weeks ago.  I never really noticed the manner in which roads are repaired until I had to. Apparently, they (whoever it is that is in charge of doing these things) fix the road section by section.

First, they cleared out a detour road. Then, they broke up a small section of the road, worked on the drainage system, smoothed the road over with cement, and waited for the cement to be cured as they began working on another section. It seemed like an agonizingly long process. At some point, I saw workers manually hauling huge, basketball-sized rocks barely making a dent on the pile they’d set out to clear.

There were moments when I was so frustrated with the slow traffic, I wondered if I should volunteer to direct the vehicles on the road. Of course that thought was fleeting. I would have probably slowed them down even more. So I waited it out, mentally prepared myself every time I went out to drive, forced myself to remain calm in the midst of traffic and watched as little by little, the road took shape. And this was only one side of the road. It must have taken more than a month before they began working on the other side and the long process began once again.

In one of those long, slow drives coming home from work, it dawned on me that the effort of growing up and becoming better is a lot like a roadwork in progress. Sometimes we look at something we need to work on – a bad habit, a negative attitude or a broken relationship, and we find ourselves at a loss on where to begin. We start on one area, feel like we’ve made progress, backtrack at some point, doggedly move forward, wonder if we’re doing the right thing, lose hope for a while, go back to working on it. And repeat the cycle when needed.

We work on these little areas – things that we can’t see connections to until one day, we look back, look at the road to find that all the little efforts over the years have built a solid, paved road. Working on ourselves and allowing God to work on us takes a lot of patience and perseverance. We wonder if we’ve made any change at all when we backtrack on our bad habits. And in many cases, the only way to deal with it is to wait it out. These purgatorial moments that sometimes stretch out into weeks and months and years are the little advents of our lives.

Advent is the season that reminds us all that we are not alone in our struggle. That the whole world, too, waits with bated breath for something wonderful to happen. It is a collective desire for peace, for things to get better, for someone to come and make it better. We wait “in joyful hope” for someone’s coming, someone who has the power to “make all things new.”

These past few weeks have been difficult for our country. Political and economic issues plague us from every side. Even world politics are unstable. Many days I wish for a ‘do-over’, a reset button to smooth out all the difficulties, to give instant solutions to recurring issues. A small part of me hopes that at the end of this advent season, I will wake up on Christmas morning with a current president who has realized the error of his ways and agrees to do better, with a former dictator’s family who apologizes for its errors, return ill-gotten wealth and exhume his body to be reburied elsewhere, for the Philippine peso to strengthen its value, for many of the senators (and politicians) to become public servants who put the interests of the country before their own, and while we’re at it – for an end to war, violence and poverty. In other words, I want someone to bulldoze the current state of Philippine politics and the Philippine economy and make it good and true and beautiful overnight.

But even as I wish that, I know that is not the way roads are built. It is not the way life happens. Advent is not about waiting for a reset button but about reminding ourselves and each other to remain hopeful as we continue to fight the good fight, to stay the course, to finish the race.  And to keep at it until we come to the changes we hope for. Real, deep and lasting changes, the ones that continue for thousands of years and that reverberate in eternity; these changes come in ways we least expect, in a time when most of the world is sleeping, and often unfolds one moment at a time. Much like how roads are built. How lives are changed. And how the Savior came to save us two thousand years ago and how he continues to recreate the world until he comes again.