Grace for the Ache of Waiting

(An Advent Encouragement)

Before my meditation, some updates: Good things happening on the book-writing front! (I mean my book—Fully Beloved, due out in March.) I look forward to sharing the good news about God’s love in the Trinity set amid our human brokenness!

Here’s what I mean about some of my doings:

I teach a 4-part adult Sunday school forum at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal in Nashville in January.

I’ll be preaching at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston and speaking at a Lenten series at St. John the Divine, also in Houston.

A book-signing is in the works at St. George’s in Nashville, plus a half-day men’s retreat.

And I’ll be doing a session at the Mockingbird Conference in NYC in late April.

I continue to post on my Substack.

Now, my reflection:

Next to suffering, waiting may be one of the hardest things we do. Sometimes waiting becomes its own kind of suffering. We can all supply our own stories when waiting was difficult—not just an inconvenience, but a heartache. I imagine you can easily come up with instances in your life where it hurt to wait. And we look with an aching heart at a world that seems shrouded in violence and darkness. We don’t always wait happily. All creations groans, as the apostle Paul aptly put it.

But waiting is also a way to ready ourselves for something more, something better. If waiting is one of our common human challenges, it is also a lesson in learning we don’t—we cannot—endlessly curate and orchestrate our lives. Much of our waiting is filled with our own preferences, of course. But we can’t always know the outcome of the thing that so worries us, the thing that in prayer we plead for. Waiting can mean we learn to hold a little more loosely our convictions about what must happen. We let go of insisting to God or to others that a certain thing must happen.

And the season of Advent helps us here. It is all about making a turn in our longing and watching. Our painful yearning, at least for moments, transforms into something more like trust. Or at least an experience with a little less stress. We begin to get a glimpse that that new possibilities lie ahead, whatever the particular result or however the next stage of the thing unfolds. There’s a soberness, but also anticipation.

Advent also makes us realize that more than certain outcomes, we want an encounter. We want to meet a loving God who will walk us through whatever we will face. “But it is for you, O Lord, that I wait,” we read in a psalm. “It is you, O Lord my God, who will answer” (Psalm 38:15). That kind of waiting posture may require practice. It may not seem natural, especially when all we want to do is make something work out in the way we deeply prefer.

A woman I know wrote a book titled Graceful Waiting, dealing with her struggles to be patient with God when hard things happened. “My waiting was anything but graceful,” she told me. “The grace was on God’s part.”

So we factor in grace—God’s good purposes, God’s ever-present help. We recall how much good God has in mind for the world. We don’t just wait, we also watch, as God directs our eyes to a Presence who may not work out his plans on our timetable. We approach life with open, even emptied hands, not clenched fists. And then as you watch, you “stretch out your hands,” as Henri Nouwen put it, “and wait again for the gift that gives new life.”

Note: These paragraphs adapt an Advent meditation I wrote for the parish Advent guide created by my church, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Nashville.