Tag: waiting

ADVENT

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If your house is anything like ours – the excitement for Christmas is brewing, especially from the 4 year old who had no concepts of dates or time, and has no clue what time frame we are working on when we tell her “not yet – soon”. The numbers on her advent calendar are wasted

I spoke this time last year at our MOPS morning in church all about advent. We attempted some cute advent crafts with the goal of keeping some sort of faith based activity in our families in the middle of the Christmas chaos.

As I was prepping for that morning, I was reminded about the whole idea of advent. The building up towards something.

The word itself is Latin and means – waiting.

Who loves waiting? Not me.

With Christmas – the wait builds a bigger anticipation. The excitement grows as the day get closer. The wait is a good one.

So what’s different?

The number 25.

We have a final peak, we know when and what it involves. The certainty of it is not up for debate. We know. The wait is exciting when we have the end in sight.

But what happens in the other type of waiting? You know the one I mean. The wait that has been longer than we thought. The wait that seems to have no best before or expiry date. The wait that has lost that excitement of the final moment. The wait that still doesn’t see.

Advent is a season of waiting. Original advent didn’t have the number 25 either on its calendar. The wait time was unknown. In fact everything about it was an anomaly. Israel waited on rescue and God sent a baby. What?

I’m drawn to the incredible way God works things out. Again there is a simple profound truth that God will always see and do things differently. And simpler again is the underlying crutch of our faith – do we trust Him?

To quote the husbands recently penned lyrics

In the waiting I will trust in you…

As my mind regurgitates information about waiting and as my heart feels all the emotions of a long wait…. the Christmas story points me to some home truths.

God is with us.

God is working in our waiting.

As surely as the sun rises each morning – He is faithful.

In CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – Narnia is stuck in winter. Spring hasn’t sprung for a very long time. The people of Narnia have adjusted to winter and the majority have settled. But there are whispers of hope heard in certain circles that Aslan is coming and he’s bringing spring with him.

I want to raise the whisper to a shout.

I want to be excited in the waiting, believing that the way everything plays out is detailed and perfect. After all – He is good, He’s for us and He gives good gifts.

Be encouraged… He knows where and when number 25 is.

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,

At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,

When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,

And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

CS Lewis


Christmas is just around the corner.

To wait is to look

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“Yet I am confident I will see the LORD’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living. Wait patiently for the LORD. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD.”‭‭Psalms‬ ‭27:13-14‬ ‭NLT‬‬

So this verse has been running around in my head since the Housefires night of worship last week.

I realised that this phrase “I will see your goodness in the land of the living” is very much a faith fuelled statement.

I sang it.

But I was challenged of how confident I was that I would actually see this goodness HERE.

I looked up the Psalm that I knew it was from and smirked to myself as the verse itself declares David was confident that he would literally see the goodness of God in the land of the living – a goodness in this life. And the challenge was real.

How confident am I in that truth and promise?

It’s easy for our confidence to take a knock when what we see doesn’t appear to be very good at all. That’s when our confidence makes a sharp exit right? When what we know to be true from God’s word isn’t what our experience is – and the tension is very real.

What do you do?

I can’t get those verses out of my head.
To be confident… To be sure in what He says. To be sure of what he promises.

I have moments were my faith seems to dip in and out of this zone of confidence.  And there is most definitely a link to what I’m thinking and leaning on in relation to it.

Verse 14 kicks off with a “wait patiently”.

I don’t even need to say much about waiting – we all know waiting patiently is something that is practically non-existent in this day and age. I get frustrated waiting on my phone to connect, or when something is downloading. I don’t know what to do when the microwave is running for 3 mins – it feels like forever. Let’s not even talk about boiling a kettle.

We really don’t have to wait much these days in our fast pace, close to instant world where everything is literally at our fingertips.

So waiting on God?? Like that’s a whole other level.

So I started to look into this whole concept of waiting.

The Hebrew word for “wait” in this passage is the word qavah. The interesting thing about this word is that it adds another dimension to this concept of waiting. It’s not waiting in an ‘I’m bored, impatient’ kinda way,  but it also means to look.

To me that adds another element.

To wait is to look.

To look for what you’re waiting for is this expectant longing that you’re going to see it. This is where our confidence builds.

I kept thinking about the scene of a groom standing at the front of a church waiting on the arrival of his bride.  The waiting is an expectant one, a cheeky look over his shoulder to see if she’s there, but knowing she is.
It’s back to this truth – what are we looking at?

When I wait – I can turn it into a long, depressing event or I can anticipate and let the excitement build as I get confident that it’s just around the corner.  Not a feeling that’s conjured up – but this confident feeling knowing that when God promises something he delivers – every time.

It might not look like we thought it would. The wait might be longer than we had anticipated. But do we trust in His perfect timing?

We have heard it said that it’s not just about the destination, it’s about the journey.

Who we become in the waiting journey is so important. The journey becomes the destination as we grow into an incredible relationship with God who in those hard moments needs to be exactly who we’re looking at.

I think the challenge for me in the waiting is to not make it about waiting but to make it about growing, leaning and looking to the one who knows and sees it all. He is good, faithful and is timing is impeccable.

Get excited about how it’s going to play out  and what he’s doing in and through you in the process.

Qavah. Wait. Look. See.