Part of our regular Sunday worship is the offering of a meditation by a member of the congregation on the Scriptures and theme of the service. I’m happy to post this week’s meditation by Jim Hukari on the First Sunday in Advent. Thank you, Jim, for sharing these good thoughts with us!
I hate waiting. To waste all that time at the intersection, waiting for the light to change. Waiting for the mail to arrive. Knowing that I have far fewer items to ring up than the lady in front of me, and I’m waiting. . . . oh, how nice, now they’re chatting. Waiting is the universal waste of time. And yet, we wait.
Waiting is not a value in our society. I don’t know where I could have learned it. And, yet, waiting is essential to the spiritual life.
Henri Nouwen described waiting as, “an awful desert between where you are and where you want to be.”
But God can do great things in the desert:
He formed a people in the desert;
He tested His Son in the desert;
He prepared an apostle in the desert.
God can work in a desert; chaotic, loud, rushed cities – not so much.
During the season of Advent, we dwell on characters that were waiting:
Zechariah and Elisabeth;
Mary is waiting;
Simeon and Anna were waiting.
And waiting reverberates throughout all Scripture – through the Psalms . . . in the Gospels; all the way through to the command to wait patiently for His Son from heaven
Waiting implies patience. Patience comes from the Latin verb patior which means “to suffer.” Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment; and for suffering to be fruitful, one needs to embrace it, live in it, taste it to the full; its being in the present and allowing yourself to really experience it.
So, while I won’t be so presumptuous as to proscribe a spiritual discipline for you, but to be blessed, you must be become good at waiting. If you haven’t already, why not use this Advent season to begin?