Advent is a season of roads—of movement, expectation, and the long walk toward hope. The Scriptures give us one striking image again and again: a highway. Not a back road, not a winding footpath—a highway prepared for God’s arrival.
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
—Isaiah 40:3
A highway is intentional. It doesn’t form accidentally. It cuts through resistance—hills lowered, valleys lifted, obstacles removed. To speak of a highway is to speak of effort, collaboration, and transformation.
Isaiah locates this road in a desert, the place where life is sparse, and direction is unclear. Many of us enter Advent carrying our own deserts—fatigue, conflict, uncertainty, grief. And yet God does not ask us to build a highway out of the desert, but in it. Advent proclaims that God does not avoid barren places; God travels through them to reach us.
For Israel, the highway in Isaiah was an image of homecoming—a path for exiles to walk back into freedom. Advent 2025 arrives in a world where many feel exiled from peace, from unity, from certainty about the future. The promise of a highway is the promise that God is carving a clear route back—back to reconciliation, back to courage, back to joy we thought we lost.
A highway is shared. It is wide enough for others. Advent asks us:
Whom are we preparing space for?
Sometimes our hearts feel more like narrow trails—only room for those who think like us, behave like us, or agree with us. But Advent’s highway stretches wider. It welcomes strangers, wanderers, skeptics, the hurting, and even those we might consider enemies. Preparing the way of the Lord often looks like widening the way for others.
Ultimately, Advent is not about our journey toward God but God’s journey toward us. Christ comes down the highway—God moving toward humanity with urgency and tenderness. The incarnation is God saying, “I refuse to let anything—distance, brokenness, or despair—keep me from you.”
As we approach Christmas 2025, the word highway invites us to consider:
- What valleys in us need lifting—discouragement, self-doubt, weariness?
- What mountains need lowering—pride, resentment, rigidity?
- What obstacles do we need to clear—old wounds, grudges, fear?
- Who needs space on the road we are building?
Christ comes. Not to a perfect landscape, but to the one we are willing to shape.
May our Advent journey be courageous and straightforward.
Inner Altar 