The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Day Three
The Sunrise is Coming
The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Waiting
Text: Psalm 130:5-6
At our house we’ve been firmly in the “How many days until Christmas?” countdown since late August. Every day—every. single. day.—my kids ask how much longer they have to wait, and every day they collectively groan when we remind them it’s still weeks away. It’s safe to say, my kids don’t like to wait. They don’t get it from a stranger, either. I am the poster child for impatience. I don’t like waiting in lines, traffic, or… well, I just don’t like to wait.
Yet here we are, at the beginning of Advent, the season on the Church calendar that is all about the waiting.
Psalm 130 is about a different approach to waiting: “I wait for the Lord… my soul waits for the Lord…more than those who watch for the morning.” This isn’t the kind of waiting that is the equivalent of watching paint dry. This isn’t an idle or helpless patience. The Psalmist imagines a a kind of waiting that is embodied and expectant.
It’s a scanning the horizon for the first glimmers of dawn kind of waiting.
It’s the waiting of people who refuse to surrender to the darkness, because they trust that the light is on its way.
Advent waiting is not a passive sitting-on-our-hands-hoping-that-God-will-fix-the-world. Advent waiting leans forward, it gets active and involved. It’s a waiting that is grounded in the hope that a better world is not only possible, but that as we begin to live as if it were so, it actually becomes real.
To wait with intention means we seek to align our choices, our compassion, our advocacy, and our imaginations with the world of which God dreams: a world where the vulnerable are protected, where peace is more than wishful thinking, and where justice is not naive hope, but a reality of our lived experience.
This kind of Advent waiting cultivates a deep and abiding hope, and that is its own kind of resistance, isn’t it? It’s the hope that grows when we refuse to believe that the way things are is the way they have to be.
Maybe what Advent wants to teach us is that waiting isn’t something to endure, but something to practice. It’s a discipline that can reorient our experience of the in-between moments in which we often live, a reminder that God is also present in our longing and active in our effort.
Because the sunrise, the Psalmist implies, is coming.
If you look closely you might even see the first rays breaking over the horizon.
May we wait, then, not with impatience but with purpose.
May our waiting be active and hopeful.
May we commit ourselves this Advent and always to joining God in the slow and steady work of healing the world.
Reflection:
What is one place in your life or community where you sense the need to “lean forward” in your waiting—and how might that shift the way you show up in the world?