Please wait.

Over the last couple of years, I have been on hold while calling this company or that company. The fact that I was on hold when calling a company about this service or that reservation is not really all that surprising. It is rare that we call a place seeking to speak with someone and are immediately greeted by a live person on the other end of the line. We have all had those moments in which we wanted to throw the phone out the window because we could not figure out the right combination of words to say to the automated attendant to actually speak to a living, breathing person.

On the times that I am remembering today, I was struck how the hold message was the simplest message you could possibly have for someone who is in the purgatory of “being on hold.” It said, “Please wait.” After a moment of time would pass, the message would get repeated without anymore fanfare or without any promise about valuing your call or how important you are as a customer. They simply asked you to wait.

The season of Advent is a season of waiting, and in some ways, the scriptures are asking us the same thing: Please wait. The Advent season is asking this of us though in a different way. We are not simply asked to wait without some knowledge of what we are waiting to receive. As people who live in a time different than the time in which Jesus walked on the earth, we have the benefit not only of reading the Gospels but also the whole canon of scripture that lays out God’s promises to creation. We are able to know the promises that God makes in the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, the ways that God spoke through the prophets, and the ways that God begins to bring about the fulfillment of all of the promises that God made at some point in time. The hold message of Advent might be as simple as “please wait” because it does not need to say more than that. The promise for which we are waiting has been made known long before we began to walk the earth. It is the fulfillment of the promise that helps us to enter into the waiting as we make our journey towards Christmas and towards receiving God into our lives in a most surprising way.

That said, waiting is rather across the grain of modern day society. We are not used to waiting for things in our lives much anymore. In place of waiting, we have Amazon, supermarkets, and digital communication. We no longer have to drop off a roll of film to be developed - even if we want printed pictures. Instead, we can simply download the photo from our phones and print them on photo paper at home. The things for which we once were used to waiting are now available at our fingertips. Waiting has become something that none of us are used to doing anymore precisely because we have made it that nobody has to wait for much of anything anymore.

But, I also think it is important for us to understand waiting as an important spiritual discipline. The promises of God were made lone ago in an age that was very different than our own. The fulfillment of those promises is something that God has long been working towards, and we are asked not simply to wait for God to fulfill those promises but also to wait to receive the good news of how we can be part of the fulfilling of those holy promises. We are invited to wait to receive good news, to experience the inbreaking love of God in our time, and to become those people who are constantly looking for the ways that God is acting in our time and in our world. We are invited to be people who enter into the inbreaking love of God and to be part of those who invite others into the waiting.

What is it that you hope to receive after the waiting of Advent? How does it feel to wait? How will you practice waiting as a spiritual practice? What is something for which you have been waiting?

In Christ,

Hunter+