Therefore, stay awake!
For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.
Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night
when the thief was coming,
he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into.
So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.
Mt 27:42-44
I don’t like waiting, and I seem to have a lot of company. We are a society that wants everything now: fast food, instant messaging, express lanes. In short, we hate to wait. Yet, in the words of the Rev. Dr. P.C. Enniss, “Our lives are inevitably shaped by those for whom we wait.”
The most profound experience of waiting I’ve ever had was the 9 months I carried my first child inside my womb. At first the days sped by, but by the third trimester, the progress of days and centimeters slowed to an excruciating pace. I was uncomfortable and a little afraid of labor, but more than anything, I was anxious to become a mother. I longed to hold my child, feed her, bathe her, sing to her. Yet in the months of carrying her inside me, I had already begun to nurture and protect her, choosing healthy foods and avoiding alcohol and caffeine. I had already grown to love her deeply. In the 9 months of waiting for this child to be born, before I ever held her or saw her face, I had already become her mother.
In Advent, as we await the coming of Jesus Christ, we long for the Kingdom of God. Isaiah tells us that “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.” In our world so filled with the suffering of innocent victims of war, disease, poverty, discrimination, and slavery, we long for Christ to come again and restore our world to balance and all people to wholeness. Yet, our lives are inevitably shaped by those for whom we wait. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote, "Although waiting is not having, it is also having. The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we already possess it." As we await the coming of the Christ and long for His return, we become the Kingdom of God on earth.
- Mary Vanderhoof is a member of the Center for FaithJustice’s Board of Trustees.
