Reflection
Advent is about patience. Advent is about waiting. Waiting goes against our expectation of an instant response. It is not popular especially now. We don’t like to wait for anything even in our spiritual lives. Christmas will come. We will celebrate the birth of Jesus, but first there must be the weeks of Advent to calm us, focus us, and remind us that the contemplative life does not come instantly. “We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. We must trust in the slow work of God.”(Chardin).
Prayer
Come, Lord Jesus.
Action
How can you slow down during Advent? Can you try to make some quiet time for yourself each day?
Suggested Reading
For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from God.
Psalm 62:5
Waiting is a hard discipline in this hurry culture. We want things to happen on our timetables and when they don’t, we get upset, depressed, or angry. It is difficult to wait when our consumer culture brainwashes us daily into the ideal of instant gratification; anything that takes too long isn’t worth getting. The season beckons us to an active kind of waiting that opens our hearts and paves the way for the wonder and peace of Christmas.
Spirituality & Practice
A waiting person is a patient person. The word ‘patience’ means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
Henri Nouwen
Waiting for Christ’s coming into the places of our lives where we need him most right now ushers us into a special kind of waiting that is alert and watchful, full of anticipation and yet patient.
Ruth Haley Barton
The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves. We are able to trust that he will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world.
Richard Rohr
Those who do not hope cannot wait; but if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.
Charles Spurgeon
Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.
John Ortberg
Timing is so important! If you are going to be successful in dance, you must be able to respond to rhythm and timing. It’s the same in the Spirit. People who don’t understand God’s timing can become spiritually spastic, trying to make the right things happen at the wrong time. They don’t get God’s rhythm – and everyone can tell they are out of step. They birth things prematurely, threatening the very lives of their God-given dreams.
T. D. Jakes
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T. S. Eliot
The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before. What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you.
Jan Richardson