Advent is a season of expectant waiting. We are masters of anticipation--just look at the weeks of hype about 'Black Friday'--but we are complete failures at waiting. In a society where everything happens immediately, we have regrettably forgotten how to wait.

Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote those words 60 years ago. By the standards of many, 60 years seems like an eternity ago. We would consider it a given that those were much slower times than today, the sort of age that the elders among us look back fondly upon as 'the good old days' when the pace of life wasn't nearly as hectic as now. If Bonhoeffer thought that people had forgotten how to wait in 1943, he would definitely be dizzied by the pace of today's world.

Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting--that is, of hopefully doing without--will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.

Those words really hit the proverbial nail on the head, don't they? We are rarely, if ever, fulfilled. Thoughtful Christians recognize that fact. Secular society recognizes this reality. The suggestion that waiting enables fulfillment, however, escapes us. The notion that without waiting we will never find fulfillment is completely foreign to us, but if we can remember back to a time when our wants were not immediately satiated, we know it is also completely true.

For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we must wait.

This Advent, let us wait expectantly and patiently.

Let us re-learn the art of waiting that we might be truly fulfilled.

"Come, Lord Jesus," we pray, "and illumine our darkness by your light."

Amen.

photo credit: Creative Commons | Lawrence OP via Compfight