How do you feel about taking time away and leaving others in charge? With Advent upon us, you might think it impossible to step back. But perhaps it’s time to be like the person in the gospel who went traveling and left others in charge for a while.

With the season of Advent, the wheel of time turns again. Now it’s all about beginnings and fresh starts. This season is pregnant with possibilities, expectant with hope.

So keep a sharp lookout, for you don’t know the timetable. It’s like a man who takes a trip, leaving home and putting his servants in charge, each assigned a task, and commanding the gatekeeper to stand watch. So, stay at your post, watching.

One summer I planned to be away for a stretch, so I arranged with a woman who worked in our condominium building to look after my place in my absence and especially to visit and feed the cats. When I returned, I learned she had turned the keys over to her teenage daughter.

As the season of Advent begins, we are watchful for the coming of the Lord and for the grace to receive him.

The Good News of Jesus Christ is always an invitation to change. Advent has begun, and like Lent, it’s a preparatory season for encountering the Lord in the divine mystery.

At a time when people are setting up manger scenes to depict the scene of the infant Jesus’ birth, it seems strange to look ahead—as this Sunday’s gospel does—to the return of a very adult Lord Jesus to gather his people at the end of time.

When the Church celebrates . . . Advent each year, she makes present [the] ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the savior’s first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming. —Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 524)