Advent waiting

             Just a little food for Advent thought from my hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
      "Celebrating Advent means being able to wait.  Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten.  It wants to break open the fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot.  But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.  Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting--that is, of hopefully doing without--will never experience the blessing of fulfillment.... For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we must wait."
     Waiting is not only a constant fact of life during war... it's a constant fact of life period.  As Bonhoeffer sat alone in a cramped prison cell in 1943, he waited.  He waited two long years in prison and contemplated the dear friends and former students who had been killed in battle, the bombing of his parents' home, the destruction of his nation, the horrors of Hitler and the Nazis.  "Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent.  One waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other--things that are really of no consequence--the door is shut, and can only be opened from the outside." 
     Just a few minutes ago I read an email from a dear friend who is waiting for her husband to come through surgery.  We have friends and family waiting in so many areas of life--some of that waiting relatively trivial, other waiting unbearably painful.  And waiting is just plain hard.  But I love Bonhoeffer's reminder that waiting, like Advent, is a "sprouting, growing, and becoming," a preparation for God's best and choicest.  Some things we can only truly learn through waiting.  Just as we wait for the coming of Christ, as we await the joyous celebration of Christmas.
     One last quote from Bonhoeffer in a letter to his fiancé while he remained imprisoned, separated from her, and facing darkness, uncertainty, and sorrow upon sorrow:
     "And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God.  Our eyes are at fault, that is all.  God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment.  No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives."
     God is revealed as love in a manger; He rules the world from a cradle.  And as we wait for Him, He is bringing light into darkness and making all things new.
     So today, wherever you are waiting... He is moving and working and ruling and preparing.  And He will make all things new.  As we wait, He works.  Trust Him in the dark.
     To God be the glory.