Reflections on waiting at the end of Advent

Today is the 23rd, which means we’ve got just a couple days of Advent left. How has yours been?

This year in particular I thought about waiting. In the past I have focused more on the mystery of Jesus’s coming, or Mary as and Advent “figure,” but this year it just came to the surface that it was time to look at my own relationship with waiting.

Some thoughts:

High-level - the entirety of the Christian life is about waiting. To me, that is one of those things Catholics say and you kind of have to think, “Uh-huh,” and not really get what it means (similarly, to me, as the phrase that suffering can be “offered up” - took me a long time to get what that means).

But it’s about waiting because, well, Jesus will return one day. So we wait.

However, waiting is hard, if you’re an impatient person.

So over the past few weeks I have used that as an opportunity to prayerfully ask myself a few questions:

How do I experience waiting?

Do I see that time as a gift? Or a punishment?

Do I believe patience is a virtue, or an excuse?

This entire year has been one of waiting, as I have reflected before. Yes, in some instances it was more about outright cancellation; your child’s graduation will never happen, properly, in the real world; the vacation you had to cancel is a goner; your favorite bluegrass and barbecue festival may not even happen next year. And so we wait for life to return to “normal,” for politicians to lift restrictions, for other politicians to determine whether Americans are worth a bailout, to see whether one will be evicted and the lights turned off. My goodness.

So, waiting - it becomes about trust. God’s time, as I was reminded by a friend recently, is massive - it is cosmic, universal, and expansive. Sometimes in the old Testament, the prophecies the prophets made didn’t come true for hundreds or thousands of years. We aren’t used to that; time happens rapidly now. Yesterday’s news may as well be last month’s news. There is always something else.

While our culture may have changed, and our own, personal relationship to time has sped up, God’s has not. If he will deliver us, he will do it - but it will be on his time. And that does not mean it counts any less; it just means we have to - you guessed it - wait.

God makes us promises. He does not forget or abandon those promises. So we see waiting is about trust. That is the season we are in; at another time it will be something else.

Has this Advent helped me learn to wait a little better? It is possible. It has certainly helped me let go a bit more.

Which leads me to my last thought: patience is a virtue, but so is hope. It is one thing to wait, and it is another to wait in hope.