Sunday, December 20, 2015

Waiting.

It's so typical for me to be really hopeful about my involvement in "advent." I've bought books, planned activities, copied prayers only to utterly and totally fail at any sort of daily practice. Every year the same. Christmas day comes and I'm all fuss and bother and the silent night/holy nights I was hoping for passed me by.

 I set my sights on January 1. That's the time for change anyway. I mean, really. When has Christmas ever been anything but stressful? The clock ticking into a new year is when I will transform into my ideal self with new goals and new habits.

Ha.

I was looking out the window today to see if any more packages were going to be delivered (oh Amazon Prime, oh Amazon Prime, how lovely is your shipping!) and I recognized that the anticipation I was feeling was something bigger than waiting on packages. I've been waiting for a few things recently, emails, approvals, letters, and it's not a feeling I hate. When the anticipated thing arrives, there is a sense of relief, but also- let's be honest- a sort of void where the anticipation used to be. Waiting generally means that you want something you don't yet have. There is lack, but there is also hope.

The Father, who was slain before the foundations of the world, has given us this sense of something coming. He has won the victory, defeated death, and seated us in heavenly places with Christ. He could have left out the part where we walk in darkness, where we groan in agony, waiting for His arrival. But He's in that. He's found there, groaning and walking and waiting. He is always more, always mysterious, always beyond what the highest intellect and imagination can contrive. He might be the fire that stokes all of creation, but He came to the earth curled up in fluid, birthed in blood and pain into a dark, clamoring, primitive world and utterly dependent on human protection.

What kind of God is this? From the very highest to the very lowest he became. Who would have ever chosen this as a method for world domination?  There must be something that we don't get. Something in His nature that is found in the gritty parts.

So we wait. We think we will get through the hard bits to the glorious bits- and that's what we anticipate. But if we embrace the waiting that He has done, (thousands of years until an odd moment in history- to be born, to grow as slowly in His human life as we do in ours, and to die- waiting for His Father's kingdom) maybe we will see that as surely as He has saved us, He has also gifted us with anticipation-so we can wait eagerly together for His Kingdom.

Waiting doesn't separate us from Him. We are not waiting for Him, we are waiting with Him. 

"Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."