A LITURGY FOR ADVENT WAITING

This feels like the worst time of the year to wait. Can we not just move this season of pause and availability to a more fitting corner of the calendar? Why not February with its string of bland days, and the natural anticipation of Spring. To wait now, when visible to-do lists, and invisible obligations grow, seems entirely inconvenient. 

Isn’t waiting what poor planners do? Those who haven’t chalked their calendars tight like my son’s laundry hamper. 

Waiting is what the needy folks do - those who have to rely on something besides their steely work ethic and chiseled independence. Waiting is for those who failed to recite their vows to efficiency. 

And so, God, 
these are my unasked complaints, objections, 
around this season of waiting. 

Because, at this time of the year, I’m fully aware 
of all that is undone. 
Undone as in not completed 
And undone as in frayed, unraveling, 
like the cuffs of my sweatshirt. 

Within this wrestling between the undone and the waiting 
Rests fear. 
Fear that you won’t show up, 
Or that you will, 
but do so in a way that is 
inconvenient 
inefficient 
or inadequate. 

And so, good God, 
help me to wait - 
for your coming that is joyously inconvenient 
for your provision that may be inefficient but never insufficient
and for your goodness that has never lacked.   

________________________

Jesse French
Executive Director