God's grace gives us faith

One of the essential paradoxes of Advent:
that while we wait for God, we are with God
all along, that while we need to be reassured
of God's arrival, or the arrival of our
homecoming, we are already at home. While we
wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but
it is God's grace that gives us that faith.
As with all spiritual knowledge, two things
are true, and equally true, at once. The mind
can't grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of
the soul.
- Michelle Blake, "The Tentmaker"