Waiting is hard, yet it is one of the most common experiences of life. We wait for the workday to end, we wait for birthdays, Christmas, the weekend, for everything! Whole business sectors have been created to reduce our wait time. If my pizza isn’t at my doorstep within 30 minutes or a package doesn’t arrive on the day it says, I wonder if it even is going to come at all. Something weird has happened to us in the modern era where, as the service we receive gets better, our expectations have hit record highs, and when those expectations outstrip the pace of innovation we get upset. This phenomenon happens in nearly every area of our lives. We can wait for a month to have a letter responded to, we can maybe wait a week to have an email returned, but if a text isn’t returned within a half-hour, we begin to doubt the closeness of a friendship. As our attention-spans shorten and our patience dwindles our demands and indignations rise. Given our proclivity to instant gratification, how can we wait well?
There are a lot of examples throughout the Bible of people who did not wait well. Abraham and Sarah thought God’s timetable was running a bit slow and tried to give this whole nation-inheritance thing a push, with some pretty disturbing results. Their impatience was a product of their lack of faith that God would be able to work the miracle of Sarah giving birth when she was old. Peter, James, and John also failed to “watch and pray” patiently for even one hour on the night when Christ was facing some of his excruciating trials in Gethsemane. Unfortunately for us all, our flesh is just as weak as theirs.
Fortunately for us, we have great examples of powerful patience in the stories of Job, Joseph, David, and Simeon. Job and Joseph trusted that the Lord had a plan for them and their lives even after they’d lost everything. David, though anointed as a youth to be king, had to endure years of assassination attempts. Through it all, he never tried to jumpstart God’s perfect plan by taking Saul’s life. And Simeon patiently waited for the birth of the Savior even though it had been 700 years since Isaiah prophesied that Immanuel would come into the world.
On this side of the Biblical timeline, the coming of Jesus can be taken for granted and we forget the waiting and patience that it took to really believe that he would one day come. However, we feel this same disbelief or impatience when trusting that he spoke truth when he said, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). Let us use this time of remembering the first advent to experience more deeply the strength that comes from waiting on the Lord and to excite our belief and expectation of Christ’s second advent.
-Joel