We Wait
We wait for a story
A stillness, a candle, a light
We wait for forgiveness
A sense of direction, a sign
We wait for You
This month of endless night
Prepare You room
For making all things right
We wait
—Sara Groves, “We Wait” © 2019 Mantle Music
It’s been a while since I’ve quoted Sara Groves, one of my favorite musical artists when it comes to telling the stories, asking the questions, and conveying the often frustrating mysteries of faith. Her 2019 album, Joy of Every Longing Heart, has been a centerpiece of my Advent devotions in recent years, or—perhaps more plainly put—my most frequent request to the smart speaker beginning sometime in October.
While many of the tracks are rearrangements of familiar Advent hymns, the one quoted above is an original. It captures in both lyric and melody the stop-and-go, pause-unpause nature of waiting. If you listen (see link above), you might hear in the keyboards a slightly more pleasant take on pumping the brakes while sitting in holiday traffic.
This year’s Advent series gives each of the four places we’re visiting (Rome, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem) a subtitle. Rome, explored last week, is described as a place of longing. Jerusalem, which we’ll look at this Sunday, is a place of waiting. When I first glanced at the series I thought, aren’t those pretty similar? Aren’t both just a prelude to something else happening? But as I wander through the stories and hymns of the season, I’ve realized how different the two are when it comes to the heart.
Longing seems to engage the heart at its best. While the experience of longing can be painful (we long for a friend, a lover, kindness, health, or wholeness), ultimately it reveals that we know and believe that something better is possible. An aching heart is an active one, one that will likely talk about or work toward the object of its longing.
But waiting is different. We wait for an appointment, or test results, or the day presents get opened. We wait for morning or bedtime or payday. And we wait knowing that there’s not much we can do to hasten the result. The test results will come back when they come back. Christmas will be Dec. 25. And in the waiting, a heart can fret, or avoid, or give up.
Peace is also possible, but—as is always the case with peace—it seems the hardest road. Ask my five-year-old how the Christmas waiting is going, or my one-year-old how it is to open only one Advent window per day. Ask Harvest Crossing, now nearly five years in and still without a shovel in the ground, what the experience of waiting for externally imposed deadlines has been like. Ask the refugee waiting for the right government official to sign the right paper so that he can be reunited with his family. Ask the person waiting for the appointment with a specialist, just under one year away. Ask the exhausted and anxious pregnant one, waiting for a child to be delivered.
Waiting and longing can both take a toll on the heart, but honestly, I’d take the longing any day. In longing, I feel connected to God, to the world, to my neighbor, to myself. But waiting? What tedium, what stress, what a challenge to keeping hope alive.
Still, wait we must. Let’s gather again this Sunday to remind ourselves of what we’re truly waiting for and Who is waiting with us. With Sara, this is my prayer:
We wait for peace
And goodwill to all men
We wait to see
The waiting is not vain
We wait
Pastor Jen
