How do you deal with waiting? Are there things that you find especially hard to wait for?
My car wouldn’t start. I’m sitting in the grocery store parking lot, wanting to get home with the groceries I had just purchased, but when I turn the key, all I got was a clicking sound. So I called  a car service, and they said they’d send somebody. The only problem – it would be an hour before they arrived. An hour?!? I had to sit in my car and wait for them to arrive. An hour hour never felt so long.
Waiting – we really don’t like to wait. We have microwave ovens to cook our food in minutes; we haveâ€on demand†movies so we can watch the movie right now; every fast food restaurant has a drive-thru window so the food is even faster. There’s instant breakfast, and instant coffee, and instant rice, instant milk, instant noodles, instant potatoes. Snail mail has been replaced by instant messaging.
Photo credit: Tripp via Flickr
It’s not that these things are necessarily bad. Sometimes they might be a great good. Every parent has cause to rejoice over the many products that are quick and easy to prepare for a hungry baby! But when we have no choice but to wait, we are ill-prepared for it. Most of the really good things in life require waiting. Every parent must wait those nine long months before a son or daughter is born. It takes four (long!) years to earn a college diploma. The big trip you planned – you have to wait until next summer before you board the plane. Wait you must!
As Christian disciples, the goods we wait for – character, answers to prayer, a word from God, the salvation of friends and family, the very return of our Lord Jesus – sublime goods – often require waiting a lifetime.
Advent is a season where we can practice, even for a short while, waiting. And a slightly different word will help us with waiting: watch. When we put watch together with wait, we begin to see that waiting is not a passive thing. When we watch as we wait, we do those things that make us ready for whatever comes our way.
So – how to watch well? [Read more…] about Advent: Watching and Waiting