The Way We Wait
I am a reader and always have been. As a child, I recall luxuriating in the feeling of being curled up on a couch with a book, absorbed in a story and a world far removed from my actual surroundings. Anything and everything could simply pass me by – I was in a wonderful place in my imagination, with all the company and activity I needed.
One thing that could move me from the couch and that interior world was word that my grandparents were coming to visit. How I looked forward to that! How I anticipated it! And how I waited for it! No longer wrapped up in my own world with the binding of a book as my horizon, I watched out the window, scanning down the street to see their car turn the corner and bring them to us.
That sort of eager, expectant, alert waiting is captured by the psalmist in the phrase, “My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning” (Psalms 130:6). This is not a waiting distracted by doing or passively resting. It is on edge, aware of what is coming, ready to feel and respond to the change that it will bring. It is a waiting that takes us out of ourselves and into the world that is about to be created. It turns us outward from any inward focus.
When John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness in advance of Jesus’ public emergence, he spoke of just such a turning. He called people in their waiting to undergo “a baptism of repentance.” To repent, in both Hebrew and Greek, means to turn from something toward something else, in a change of posture or a change of awareness. John teaches me that waiting for God to act in the world, as we do during Advent, means turning away from my comfortable, cozy place to watch where it is that God will appear. It means expecting something new and different, and anticipating what it may call forth from me in response.
With two weeks left until Christmas, we are waiting. Well, given how Christmas has culturally backed up to invade all of December, often November, and sometimes even parts of October, perhaps we are not waiting so much. But waiting is what Advent calls us to do. As Advent and John encourage us to wait, I welcome the invitation again to be drawn out of myself as once I was drawn out of my books. I pray that I can set aside for a time the world of my own imagination and doing – the lists, the busyness, the schedule in which I am so easily wrapped up. I want to press my nose to the window of the world again and see what has changed while I’ve been preoccupied, see where God might next appear, see where I might soon find myself engaged in whole new ways.
Judy Robinson
Thank you, Peter, for sharing the excitement of waiting and the discovery of advent once more!
Diana Holland
Beautifully stated.Thank you for sharing.
Lynn Robinson
This is beautiful, Peter. Thank you.
Patty Johannesen
This most beautifully written about Advent. Thank you. I can’t wait to press my nose against the window and LOOK! For change.