What Happens When We Wait?

We are currently in a four-part Advent devotional series, where we are praying through the themes of longing and waiting. Last week, we talked about how our unfulfilled longings can be invitations to find God in prayer.

Today, I want to reflect a little more deeply on what happens in our hearts as we wait.

Advent is, of course, all about waiting. It’s about how the Jewish people waited for hundreds of years for the promised Messiah. It’s about how Mary and Joseph waited for their baby to be born. It’s about how the church waits for the Second Coming of Christ. And, it’s about how we wait for God’s coming in us and around us.

Learning how to wait well has always been a key part of Christian spirituality for centuries. Yet, many of us are really bad at waiting!

Are you good at waiting? Do you happily jump in the long line at the grocery store, or do your shoulders tense up and anxiety spike at the thought of spending extra time in the store? (Or, have you switched entirely to grocery deliveries, eschewing waiting in lines entirely?) If Amazon Prime can’t do a one-day delivery for your item, do you cancel the order and make different plans? If someone talks to you for too long, do you silently check out of the conversation, anxious to rush to the next item on your schedule?

For the biblical authors, patience is a fruit of the Spirit, and is evidence that one is living a Spirit-filled life (Galatians 5:22). Paul encourages the Ephesians to persevere in prayer (Eph 6:18). The author of Hebrews talks about needing endurance to make it to the promise of the day when Jesus returns to make all the wrong things right (Heb 10:36). Patience. Perseverance. Endurance. Oh, what forgotten Christian virtues!

The desert fathers and mothers celebrated the value of what they called prudence, which Pete Scazzero often defines as “the ability to wait on God for as long as it takes.” Many report that prudence was one of the primary virtues required for one to be a Christian leader in the early centuries of our movement. Do we value the ability to wait in our leaders, or do we value their capacity for decisiveness and quick decision-making?

Even the Charismatic-Pentecostal tradition celebrates waiting! In the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in the 1900s, the burgeoning Pentecostal movement was famous for its practice of “tarrying,” or waiting in the presence of God for the supernatural gift of tongues, inspired by Jesus’s instructions to wait for the promise of the Father in Acts 1:4. On the outside, this might seem like a far cry from the prudence of which the desert mothers and fathers write, but the principle is the same. I believe that what was cultivated in the hearts of early Pentecostals waiting at the altar for a supernatural gift that they could not work up or produce on their own is the same fruit of the Spirit that Paul writes about in Galatians 5:22 — patience. Are we the kinds of people who can wait for the promise of the Father, or are we the kinds of people prone to rushing for fulfillment?

Are we willing to wait for God for as long as it takes? Or do we try to rush his arrival?

Ultimately, this is what Advent is about. We are learning to wait for God’s arrival. We are learning to slow down and stop rushing to the end of the story. We are learning to be ok that everything is not ok yet, and that it won’t be fully until Jesus comes back to make every wrong thing right. We are becoming a people who trust that God is going to come through, whether we wait well or not.

One of my favorite Advent quotes is from Pastor Rich Villados, who writes that “the good news of Advent is not that we are faithful in our waiting (we often aren't) but that God is faithful in his coming.”

In M. Robert Mulholland, Jr’s spiritual formation classic Invitation to a Journey, he writes of the season that most of us seeking to follow Jesus will have to go through — purgation. The idea of it is similar to what St John of the Cross writes about in his poetry on the dark night — it’s a season where God prunes us of everything we trust in and love more than God himself. We become detached from finances, community, the right job description, and old ways of understanding faith and God, and more attached to God himself.

Advent, the season of darkness before the light comes, is a season of cultivating the fruit of patience that can only come through waiting. It’s a season of dark night. It’s a season of tarrying, waiting for the Promise of the Father. Ultimately, it’s a season of purgation.

Mulholland describes exactly what happens on the inside of us when we wait:

This Advent, do we find ourselves more anxious or more at peace?

What Mulholland (echoing the spiritual masters of 2,000 years of Christian history) is talking about is not a surface-level decision to trust God, but rather a deep and always painful Spirit-led reorientation of our inner trust structures. In a dark night of the soul, when finances have run out, when community fails us, and where there is death and loss, we are confronted with how much we actually don’t trust God even when we say that we do.

The hardest part of waiting for God is simply to sit in the waiting, instead of rushing, manipulating, or trying to control the situation to achieve our desired outcomes. I know how painful it is to live in the tension of unfulfillment. It is deeply painful to long for a satisfactory income level, a fulfilling job description, a rich community life, yet to be forced to wait in the awkward “not yet.”

This morning, I’d love to invite us to a simple Advent posture of sitting, waiting, and paying attention to what God is doing in our waiting.

Last week, I invited us to name an unfulfilled longing in our lives. If we haven’t already, I’d love to invite us to either bring that longing to mind or to name it for the first time. Where is an area of our lives where we are waiting for God to break through? (Next week, we’ll get specific about naming some of those longings from Psalm 42). Today, I want us to allow God to draw our attention to what he is cultivating in the garden of our hearts as we wait.

I’d love to invite us to take some deep breaths. Perhaps as you breathe in, you can pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, you can pray, “Holy Spirit.”

Then, as you name an unfulfilled longing before God, I’d love to invite us to simply pray:

“Lord, what are you cultivating in the garden of my heart as I wait for you? Would you help me to lay down my attempts to strive, manipulate, and control this situation, and to trust you instead?”

If you feel like it, perhaps use the words of Psalm 42 to guide our prayers today:

P.S. Thank you so much for praying with me in this Advent devotional series on longing, waiting, and prayer! If you have a friend or colleague that you think would benefit from these devotionals in which we are seeking to come alive and live in love with Jesus through this blend of contemplative and charismatic spiritualities, please feel free to share my subscribe link with them: ryanpmurphy.beehiiv.com.

P.S.S. Next week, we’ll dive deeper into Psalm 42 as I think it can help us name some of the core longings of the human heart that we are invited to direct towards God in this Advent season.