Waiting & Watching
An Advent Reader from a Community of Joy

When waiting and watching for Jesus is complex, then waiting in community is all the more important. Join the New Leaf community during Advent and lean into the joy that comes when we wait together.

The New Leaf Advent Reader has become an annual tradition, with reflections written by Canadians dropping into hundreds of inboxes across Canada each year in anticipation of Christmas

This collection brings together reflections published between 2018 and 2025, written by pastors and poets, academics and lay people, by women and men from across Canada and across Christian traditions: a community of contributors, waiting and watching together, united in their love for Jesus and for the church.

This year, for the first time, the Advent Reader is coming off the screen and onto the page! The New Leaf Advent Reader is now in print!

Waiting & Watching Together: An Advent Reader from a Community of Joy gathers reflections from the past 8 years of the Advent Reader into one volume. Since 2018, we've had 129 Canadian writers offer 176 reflections to this community. We’ve chosen some of our favourites, added prayers for each week and original Canadian artwork, and gathered them into a beautiful volume available in both paperback and special edition hardcover.

Buy the print book

Read last year’s Advent Reader posts:

Featured

Christmas Day

Here we are on Christmas Day, the end of Advent, but also the beginning of the season of Christmas, not just a single day. For some, a season of Christmas means the season of social over-commitment. Where the season is extended because there are so many family and friend gatherings that the celebration extends into January. But, in the church calendar, the season is marked by the time between the Feast of the Nativity on December 25 until Epiphany on January 6th….

Fourth Wednesday of Advent, Christmas Eve

On November 11, I trudged slowly through freshly fallen snow, to the front door of the long- term care facility, my Mom’s home for almost three years. The walk was slow, deliberate, knowing this would be the last time I passed through the door. Before sunrise that morning, her caregivers called, well acquainted with moments like this, letting us know it was time to return after days of keeping vigil by her bedside. My mother’s long journey with dementia was nearing its end…

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Hope is an audacious thing. It’s this fine silver thread that weaves itself in and through our hearts and binds us to Possibility in a way that defies reason and explanation. We trust Hope, against all odds. We see it, that fine silver thread, glimmering in the darkest of spaces, and its beauty is so heartbreakingly breathtaking that all we can do, sometimes, is weep in its presence….