1st Sunday of Advent...Waiting

Waiting is a very difficult thing. Many of us do not do this very well. We live in a world where the concept of waiting seems absurd, especially at this time of year. Everybody is impatient. The lines are too long, people crowd the malls - people are everywhere. Just yesterday I was at Polo Park and the amount of people pushing and shoving and trying to get ahead of the next person was insane. I must admit that I too was one of those people. Waiting is just a hard thing.
Ironically, today is first advent and the title is waiting. How fitting. The reading I was looking at this morning was by Henry Nouwen. He describes waiting as being openended, active and waiting with a sense of promise.
When we wait, we are hoping for something concrete and something we wish for. We want our life to go in a certain direction. We ourselves have a plan for what we want, but a lot of us tend to forget that God has a plan too and his plan may be a little bit different than ours. I love the story of Zachariah and Elizabeth and Mary. They all found themselves waiting. I can't even imagine what it must be like to wait for the arrival of a child. Nouwen says they were all "waiting not with wishes, but with hope". Nouwen says that is a very radical attitude toward life and I agree. This type of waiting means trusting that there is a plan far beyone our own imagining. It is giving up control of our futures to God and letting Him define our lives, rather than ourselves.
Waiting, Nouwen says, is also active. It is not passively saying that, "oh well, I can't control things, so I guess I'll just sit here and do nothing but wait". Nouwen says, rather it is "waiting and being present in the moment. That you are aware of something that is going to happen and you want to be present for it". Elizabeth, Zachariah and Mary knew exactly what they were waiting for and being present in the moments of waiting. Waiting is a patient process. It means allowing God to work within you and trusting that something will grow from the seed that has been planted within you.
Finally, Waiting is a sense of promise. People have the ability to wait because they have received a promise that something will come out of their waiting. Mary will bear a son! At the end of the waiting, there will be a child that Mary will be able to hold. There is a prize at the end of the road. This type of waiting makes the whole waiting process a little more bearable when we know that something will result at the end. Mary was living with a promise that helped sustain her through the waiting period.
Too often I find myself not even aware of what I am waiting for. I just want things to change. I forget that God has planted a seed within me and now I must take an active, open-ended response to the promise that God has given me. God has promised that He will send His son into the world to save me from my sins and that He will not leave us or forsake us. My hope and prayer for this season of waiting is that I might be attentive to God's voice in my life and that his hope and promise would sustain us all through whatever it is that we need to wait for.