Advent Day 23,
The season flees quickly, nearly gone now, and then will come the long walk through Lent, and the great Easter Morning.
23 days of actively waiting in Advent. And I'm no better at it then I was at the start. I remain impatient for the waiting to be completed. For Jesus to arrive. For the dark night to give way to dawn.
Bread knows how to wait. It sits on the counter, and waits for the yeast to do its thing, for itself to become fully bread, and not just something that could turn into bread if let to wait. And no matter how I tap my finger, nor how often I resist the urge to poke it just to nudge it along a bit, the bread will take its own time.
I'm terrible at waiting - waiting for bread, for brownies to cool, for the morning to come, for it to be late enough in the morning to call my friend in California without waking him up. Waiting for the day of the trip to come, waiting for things to mend with a person I'm cross with, or who's cross with me.
Sometimes it seems that all my life is waiting - for an author to email me, for the page proofs to arrive from India, for the light to change, for the line to shorten, for the show to start, for intermission to end. Just waiting.
Waiting for the Lord to make Himself known, or the Holy Spirit be near me in prayer. For divine provision. For Jesus to calm the storm, multiply the bread, heal what's ill, bring peace for once, for all.
Everytime I have to wait for something, I feel like the Lord is bending near to me and saying, "Dear Child, you must learn to wait upon me, in that to trust me, you must learn to stop poking at the bread with your finger and have faith that the yeast will work. Dear One, Dear One, Let me teach you how to wait."
In this season of expectancy, Jesus is asking me to wait like bread. To rest, without kneading or pounding or shaping, and let the Holy Spirit change me from the inside out, and in that to become the lady He plans for me to be.
It would be so much easier if He would give me a list of jobs to do while the waiting was happening, if there were more I could do to get the dough to rise. But there's not. There's just sitting at rest, and letting the change happen through His work, in His time.
12.22.2009
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Perhaps is we measure ourselves on being better, we put more on us than God does? Waiting is hard, and no fallen human can do it perfectly -- read John's wonderful ending to Revelation, and you can imagine an impatient longing: "Come, Lord Jesus!" Come now! Stop dilly-dallying! I'd say you can find similar sentiments in some of the psalms and Wisdom literature. So maybe if we hope to improve oursleves too much, we put too much burden on ourselves.
Maybe, rather, the goal is to see how hard improvement is -- and, in so discovering this, to realize just how wonderful a gift it is that Christ came to us, and that he has promised to come again. Jesus was born into this imperfect, impatient world, after all. He gave his life not just for what he wants us to be, but for us as we are. He loves us as we are. The lady he loves is simply Sara -- imperfections and all. If we can grow, that's wonderful. But it won't make him love us any more, for how can you love more someone who you already love completely?
So maybe the Christmas miracle at the end of this Advent journey isn't so much that we're able to learn to wait or grow, but that God has come to us as we are, and loves us despite all the foils and foibles of our lives and our world.
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