Yesterday’s Nouwen daily meditation really hit home:
Most of us consider waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The bus is late? We cannot do anything about it, so we have to sit there and just wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when somebody says, “Just wait.” Words like that push us into passivity.
But there is none of this passivity in Scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. Right here is a secret for us about waiting. If we wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted and that something has already begun, it changes the way we wait. Active waiting implies being fully present to the moment with the conviction that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, believing that this moment is the moment.
Patience is more than just an acceptance of waiting. It is a sense of being present in the anticipation of the moment.
Is that not the perfect encapsulation of Advent? A sense of active waiting for the return of our Lord? That waiting is a time to “make straight the paths of the Lord” – to practice sacrifice and love so that we may ready ourselves and our world for His return. But it is not just waiting.
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