I don’t know about you, but it seems as though nothing has gone according to plan this year. We’ve all experienced a series of disappointments caused by this dangerous and determined virus. From church closures, to holiday plans missed, to annual shopping fun cancelled it has been a great challenge to ‘keep calm and carry on’. Such an unprecedented time we’re living through! Even the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it couldn’t select merely one Word of the Year for 2020, instead offering a list of words or phrases that marked a “rapidly and repeatedly changing” cultural landscape, including the word blursday — when you’ve been sheltering in place for so long because of a global pandemic you have no idea what day it is as they all blur together.

So much of this year has been about waiting… waiting because we don’t know what’s coming next, or when we can return to church, or when a vaccine will be released. This is the typical way that we think of ‘waiting’, as a passive nothingness when circumstances are out of our hands. But this is not the spiritual waiting we are invited into in the season of Advent. Advent, like Lent, is about expectation because we believe in the promise that something is coming because something has already begun. I was rereading The Path of Waiting by Henri Nouwen and he perfectly articulates this kind of spiritual waiting when he notes, “We can really wait only if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. So, waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more.” Spiritual waiting is never passive!

Jesus himself beckons us into this active waiting in the Gospel this Sunday, ” Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come … And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” We can wait because we know that God’s unfolding plan is not only unfolding all around us, but it includes us! “Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment …” Nouwen says. I often spend a lot of effort trying to feel like I’m in control of more in my life than I actually am– and this pandemic has brought me face-to-face with that reality. But I deeply believe in God’s unfolding plan and so I don’t seem to struggle with active waiting in the season of Advent or Lent. The seeds have already been sown and while I await the harvest, I continue to tend the field. This year my goal is to take that spiritual practice outward into the rest of my life, and hopefully I’ll learn to rest a little less in my own need for control and more in God’s waiting embrace.