What is your immediate image of waiting?
The line at the grocery store is slow and winding. You’ve arrived at the coffee shop on time, but your friend is stuck in traffic. You have to sit outside the little room where your kid is taking piano lessons, and those 30 minutes never felt so exhaustive.
What do you do? Maybe you’re like me and you reach for your phone. You need a distraction to get you through those precarious minutes, and so you scroll through your social media feed, you check your emails, you catch up on the news.
And I wonder: How do you feel? Stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, worried. You find yourself judging, comparing, wishing for something else, something more, full of envy. Your mind bubbles over with to-do lists and a gnawing sense that there are just not enough hours in the day. That free-fall period of waiting simply serves to remind you of all you’re not — and all you’re not accomplishing.
Too often, in our worried need to fill time, to do something, waiting leads us to a precipice upon which we stand and subsequently gaze out and into any number of tumultuous emotions, feelings of doubt, worry, insignificance. And yet, waiting is precisely what this upcoming season of Advent is about.
Advent waiting is more than standing in line at the checkout, more than sitting alone in a café while your friend finds a parking spot, more than counting down the remaining minutes in your child’s music lesson. Of course it is — it’s leading up to the birth of Christ!
And yet, these little instances of waiting should not be dismissed so quickly. Because in these moments, we are given a chance to work our spiritual muscles, to till the soil of our own souls. What if Christ could be born in these instances of waiting? God is in all things, all moments, all places, and so the Spirit hovers just there, just out of view, spilling grace upon these humdrum examples of daily monotony.
Return, then, to those feelings that arise when waiting is required. Return to your impulse to distract yourself, to fill the time, to feel accomplished. I wonder: Where lies the antidote to this incessant, whispered need to look elsewhere?
Here’s the thing: I know for myself that I don’t feel great when I’ve filled periods of inevitable waiting with doomscrolling and forced productivity. In the Ignatian sense, how might we act against these impulses?
By stoking our inner flames of joy.
I know joy can feel in short supply; I know joy might seem a silly thing to seek at the grocery store, the café or the music school. And yet, the thing about joy is this: It can be fueled by the tiniest, seemingly most insignificant sources. A smile. A memory. A song. A simple human interaction.
What if, in our moments of waiting, we sought these out? What if we lifted our gazes from our phones and ourselves and looked out at the world, seeking after Christ who desires to break anew into each and every moment? Waiting, in this sense, is not something thrust upon us but an active practice into which we lean, a practice that we engage.
Let that be our disposition as we look ahead to the Advent season.
And as we do, as we prepare to wait joyfully for Christ, I invite you to sign up for our annual Advent series. A song is a simple way to lift our gaze with joy, and so once again, our community of writers is sharing reflections on songs that help them journey through the Advent season.
That’s right. “Waiting & Wassailing: Daily Advent Meditations on Story & Song” is back!
