Waiting

 

We’re not that good at waiting, is it because it just feels like we’re not doing anything?  Living in the 21st-century we seem to have an ever-shrinking attention span; our wealth and technology allow us to access virtually anything we want any time we want. Everything is sooner, faster, now. Impatiently we wait in line on the phone, there’s 20 in the queue in front of us, disaster! Someone did not answer our email by return, how could they do this to us? If anyone needs to learn the Advent virtue of waiting upon the Lord, it’s us.

What is it like to wait for God? Many of us know exactly what that is like. We wait for God to explain why a family member died too young. We wait for God to open a path out of a marriage that has ended, into a new place where healing might begin. We wait for God to reveal an open door back into a faith community when we’ve been hurt by others.

And of course, virtually this entire year has been a time of waiting. We’ve waited during lockdowns and quarantines. We’ve waited on masks and respirators and loo paper. We’ve waited on test results for the coronavirus. We’ve waited endless weeks and months, not able to visit our loved ones in hospitals and care homes, in order to protect them.

Children and parents have waited for schools to reopen and students waited to see if they could return home for Christmas. Would our jobs hold out during the crisis? We’ve waited for a vaccine. And we’ve waited and waited and waited to go back to church in the old ways that were familiar and comfortable to us.

2020 has often felt like a year of waiting. Perhaps we’re better equipped now than we ever have been to understand that phrase ‘wait upon the Lord’. The good news is that God is working for us as we wait for God.

So we’re waiting for the coming of the Christ Child on Christmas Day, that glorious moment of incarnation when God comes to be with us in human form and we’re doing another kind of waiting. We’re waiting for the signs of the Incarnation in our own lives. We’re waiting to see the new way that God will be manifest in our own individual time and place. God is with us, but where and how? We wait and watch, on the lookout for the new signs of his presence waiting to be discovered in the everyday.

Patience is a hard-earned virtue, and many of us are deeply wearied by all the waiting we’ve had to do, all the times we’ve had to say no to ourselves and our children this year in order to stay safe and keep others safe. It might feel like 2020 is a year out of time, a wasted and empty expanse that consisted of nothing but life on hold. But is that true? Was this time of waiting really wasted? What is most important about church? How have you found new strengths by the call to adapt and the sudden multiplication of time and new challenges?

But the good news is that the slow, necessary, at times painful work of being changed, of being made ready for incarnation, is not up to us alone. God is the agent of our transformation as we wait. Knowing this reminds us that we don’t have to do this on our own. There is peace and comfort in the truth that as the endless days of waiting crawl by, God is active within us and our communities.

And so, we pray, and we stick together, and we love one another, and we wait upon the Lord. And Isaiah, the great prophet of the Advent season, announces the good news:

“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.”