In the foreword, the writer notes:
American culture gives us lots of cues about how to live inside time. Chiefly, we are told to spend it (have you ever noticed that almost all the verbs we pair with time are borrowed from the worlds of finance - spend, save, manage...) We're told, by advertisements and by our Blackberries, to squeeze time dry, to use it well, to maximize it.
The church tells us a different story about time - it is God's, and there is enough of it, more than enough. The church's narrative about time is never clearer than during Advent, when we are invited to spend out time very foolishly indeed. We are invited to wait. Just to wait.
This seems to be an especially important invitation as we enter this time of year. Over the next few weeks, most of us will find our lives becoming even busier than usual. Our schedules will become full of planning and attending holiday gatherings with family, friends, colleagues, and clubs. We will go shopping here, there, and everywhere in search of the perfect gifts. And then there are all the tasks associated with closing out another calendar year that we must squeeze in somehow (for me, this means a mountain of Charge Conference paperwork!). And yet, on this Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, the church starts time anew. Rather than closing out a year, we begin a new one. And the invitation is not to work ourselves into a frenzy, but rather to slow down, to quiet, to simply wait. I wonder how that feels to you? Does it feel impossible...or appealing? Do you find yourself wanting to resist the invitation...or to embrace it? However you encounter the invitation, I pray that we might enter it together and learn what waiting offers to our lives of faith and our walk with God.
Over the next four weeks, we will explore together:
- Why we wait,
- What it feels like to be someone who waits,
- What happens when we don't wait, and
- Why God might want us to get better at waiting.
We will explore these questions by walking alongside some important biblical characters who waited...and waited...and sometimes, waited some more: Abraham and Sarah, the prophets of the Hebrew (Old) Testament, John the Baptist, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. The hope is that by delving into and practicing waiting, we might be enabled to turn more and more towards God (and away from ourselves), and from being driven by an unpredictable future to being fully and joyfully present.
Happy waiting! ~Emily