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We waited until the day after Thanksgiving to decorate our Christmas tree. It was hard to wait this year. We talked about decorating for Christmas after Halloween. It didn’t feel right, but it did. In lots of ways, our house like yours perhaps, just wants to hurry up and get this year over with. Fast forward to 2021 please! Dump the turkey, skip the stockings, and just take me to New Year’s Eve already.
And yet I know, and so do you, that there is great value in waiting. It builds character and develops resilience. The waiting room of our souls, after all, is where we grow to be the person God created us to be. Advent is that waiting room. It is the season of the Church year that is all about waiting. It is the value-added proposition to the promise of Christmas and the hope of a baby born in a manger. It is the expectant anticipation of all that is to come.
This year, maybe more than any other year, we can truly experience Advent as a gift to be slowly unwrapped, unbothered by the urgency of now. Maybe, just maybe we could learn to savor the season we are in and not simply endure it until we get to something better. Could the pregnancy of the possible be as joyful as the birth itself?
While we wait in these last weeks of this year, let us not be hurried into completion, as tempting as that may be, but rather in reflection notice that along the way, throughout all that has been, we were in fact being patiently pursued by a God who waits for us.
What are you waiting for? Before you hit fast forward to get whatever it is, seek the value of waiting upon the Lord. Those who do, the prophet says, “Will renew their strength. They will rise like wings of an eagle. They run and not grow weary. They will walk and not grow faint.” Isaiah 40:31
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