The purpose of Advent is to prepare our hearts for Christ’s coming, remembering His birth and waiting in hope for His return. In this reflection, Robert Bortins, CEO of Classical Conversations, shares what that waiting has taught his family about faith, presence, and the questions children carry home. The waiting is holy. This is how to make room for it at home.
A Question After Communion
After communion, my church says together: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ is coming again.” Not long ago, my son turned to me and asked, “We’ve been saying this for nine years. When is He coming?”
I didn’t have a tidy answer. But his question is the question of Advent itself. It is also, I have come to believe, one of the great questions of family life: what do you do when the thing you are waiting for does not arrive on your timetable?
What Is the Purpose of Advent?
Advent means “coming.” The word comes from the Latin adventus, meaning arrival. It is the four weeks before Christmas, when Christians prepare to celebrate Christ’s first coming and look ahead to His second coming.
The season asks us to sit in the same tension the Old Testament saints lived in for centuries. The promise is sure, but the fulfillment tarries. Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Advent trains that restlessness into hope. We wait because God’s timing is not ours, and He is at work in every hour of the waiting.
Why Faith Questions Surface at the Family Table
Here is what struck me most about my son’s question: he asked it at home, at our table, after church, in the ordinary flow of a Sunday. He didn’t raise his hand in a classroom and wait for a bell to end the conversation. He asked his father, in a moment neither of us scheduled. The question hung in the air long enough for both of us to sit with it.
That timing is the whole argument of Deuteronomy 6. Moses did not tell the Israelites to enroll their children in a weekly seminar on the commandments. He told them to talk about the things of God “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:7).
The formation of a soul was always meant to happen in the unhurried, unscheduled, repeated moments of daily household life. That is precisely where the hardest questions tend to surface.
The Conviction Behind SILK
This is the deep conviction behind my new book, SILK: More Kids, More Wealth. SILK stands for Single Income, Lots of Kids. The economics matter, and I make the case for them at length, but at its heart the book is an argument about where the questions that actually shape a human being get asked, and by whom they get answered.
A child who wonders aloud about the return of Christ, or about suffering, or about why the family had to say no to something the neighbors said yes to, needs a parent within earshot. That parent needs the time, the presence, and the theological seriousness to sit with the question rather than hand it off. You cannot outsource that kind of presence to an institution, however excellent. You can only build a household ordered so that presence is possible.
Aristotle’s Household: Why Advent Is a Family Season
Aristotle called the household, the oikos, the first and most basic human community. It is where life begins to be ordered toward the good, long before the wider community takes shape. I think about that claim every Advent, because Advent is fundamentally a household season. It is observed at a table, around a wreath, in the slow lighting of candles that mark a wait no one can hurry along.
As educators and parents, we know this waiting intimately. We plant seeds in September and often don’t see the harvest until spring, or years later, or never in this life at all. The ah-ha moment, the delighted “I get it now,” rarely arrives on our schedule. It comes in God’s fullness of time, just as the first Advent did.
The SILK household is built, deliberately, to have room for this kind of waiting. When both parents are stretched across full-time employment and institutional schedules for their children, the margin to sit with a nine-year-old’s question about the Second Coming simply does not exist. It gets deferred, or it gets a rushed half-answer on the way out the door.
A home ordered around one income and a parent present to teach, to listen, and to wait alongside her children is the structural precondition for the kind of formation Deuteronomy 6 describes. You cannot teach diligently when you sit in your house if no one is reliably sitting in the house.
Plato on the Earliest Years of Formation
Plato made a similar observation in the Laws, before Aristotle refined it. The earliest and most decisive years of a child’s formation, he argued, happen at home, under the steady attention of parents who shape a child’s habits and affections before formal instruction is even possible.
A mother or father who is present enough to notice when a child’s question is really a question, and not merely idle curiosity, is doing the most consequential educational work there is. My son’s question about the Second Coming was not on any lesson plan. It surfaced the way most truly formative questions do: sideways, after church, over lunch, when nobody was looking for it. Plato would not have been surprised that the moment came at home. He expected it to.
Tolkien, the Shire, and the Virtue of Rootedness
- R. R. Tolkien understood something about waiting that our culture has largely forgotten. The hobbits of the Shire were not people in a hurry. Their wealth was not measured in accumulated treasure, the dragon’s hoard sitting cold and sterile under the mountain. It was measured in deep roots: large families, long friendships, gardens tended across seasons, and a patience born of knowing that good things take time to grow.
When the hour of trial came, it was the rooted, unhurried, seemingly unremarkable hobbits who proved equal to it. They had been formed, slowly and daily, in a household and a culture that loved permanent things.
Read Tolkien’s The Hobbit, used in Challenge II
C.S. Lewis and “Men Without Chests”
Advent asks the same patience of us that the Shire modeled. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned that a culture which loses confidence in objective value produces what he called “men without chests.” These are people with intellect and appetite but no formed moral center, no capacity for the sacrificial commitments that faith and family require.
A chest is formed slowly, the way my son’s question was answered: imperfectly, honestly, in real time, at a table, by a father who did not have all the answers but had the time to stay in the room.
When Is Jesus Coming Back? How I Answered My Son
The answer for my son is that Christians have been waiting for Christ’s return for nearly 2,000 years. Our waiting is what ties the generations of Christians together. We are practicing Isaiah 40:31: “But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” That waiting is, I would argue, the central thing.
This is the invitation at the heart of SILK, a call to abundance: to time, to presence, to the kind of household where the hardest theological questions your children will ever ask are met by a parent who has ordered the whole shape of family life around being able to sit with them.
Augustine spent his early adulthood chasing achievement and status before he understood that the heart’s restlessness is only ever answered by rightly ordered love. Advent gives our children, and us, practice in exactly that kind of waiting.
Why the Formation of Children Matters Now
I think often of the theologian J. Gresham Machen, who argued nearly a century ago, in his 1933 address “The Necessity of the Christian School,” that the most consequential struggles of his age were being fought over the education and formation of children. He was right, and that struggle has only intensified since. Every institution that shapes a child, however well-intentioned, is competing for the hours and the attention that once belonged, almost by default, to the home.
SILK is my attempt to make the case, with numbers as well as Scripture, that a family can reclaim those hours. Not perfectly. Not without sacrifice. But really, and on an income far more ordinary than the culture will tell you is required.
Frequently Asked Questions About Advent
What does Advent mean?
Advent means “coming.” It comes from the Latin adventus, meaning arrival. Advent is the four weeks before Christmas, when Christians prepare to celebrate Christ’s birth and look ahead to His return.
Why do Christians celebrate Advent?
Christians celebrate Advent to practice hopeful waiting. We remember how God’s people waited centuries for the Messiah, and we wait now for Christ to come again. Advent trains restlessness into hope.
How do you explain Advent to a child?
Tell them Advent means “coming,” and that it is a season of getting ready for Jesus. Light the Advent wreath together at the table, read a simple family Advent devotional, and let them ask questions. Honest answers, and staying in the room for the hard ones, matter more than perfect ones.
What does “men without chests” mean?
It is C.S. Lewis’s phrase from The Abolition of Man. It describes people with intellect and appetite but no trained moral center, the “chest,” to connect the two. Lewis argued that this center is formed through education in what is truly good.
What does SILK stand for?
SILK stands for Single Income, Lots of Kids. It is the title of Robert Bortins’s book, SILK: More Kids, More Wealth, which makes the case that a single-income household can give children the time and presence that faith formation requires.
Teach Your Children to Wait Well
None of this is a claim that we have it figured out. April and I are raising three young children, and I still find myself, more often than I would like, without a tidy answer to the questions they ask me. What I have learned is that the tidy answer was never really the point. The presence was.
A father who stays in the room after the hard question is asked is teaching something no curriculum can replicate: that the wait itself is full. It is where faith is formed.
So this December, teach your children to wait well. It is one of the most Christian things you can model.
If you want help thinking through what a household built for that kind of presence actually looks like, structurally, financially, and theologically, you can find SILK: More Kids, More Wealth here. It is the book I wish someone had handed my wife and me years ago.
Merry Christmas.
Continue reading more Christmas inspirational messages here:
- The Great Reversal: A Christmas Message for Classical Homeschool Families
- Advent Reflections and Lessons
- The Twelve Days of Christmas: Twelve Gifts and Twelve Activities
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