Waiting on God

Do you ever wait on God?

Really the question should be, do you wait for anything at all anymore?

It's no new revelation that our society moves at break neck speed.

From fast food to fast life and everything in between, we rarely have to wait for anything.

We want it, we go out and get it. We miss it, another one comes in a few minutes. We get what we want, when we want it. And something tells me that must play havoc on our sense of God's presence, our sacred space and our practices of spirituality.

Often times, those in the Christian world have to spend intentional time working to slow ourselves down. And on top of that then feeling the need to announce it to the world. Like somehow our "unplugging" and blocking out times of waiting on God and "giving up" our communication tools is so profound, surely we must tell the world!

Don't get me wrong, I think that slowing down, disconnecting and waiting are vitally important, but isn't it strange that we live in a society, and a Christendom, that somehow has waiting and slowing down the exception and not the norm?

I think it is important to distinguish waiting on God and passivity. I often hear that people get away, to do nothing, to wait on God. I have often pondered that perhaps we have separated our waiting incorrectly, and that it is within the complex facets of our life that we need to grapple with waiting. A spiritual discipline of sorts, when all of life suggest to wait for no one, we practice an active waiting on God.

I liken this phenomenon of waiting = doing nothing, with the Youth Retreats of my younger years. "Get away from the everyday to get alone with God" when really I needed patience and disciple to wait on God in the everyday of my normal life. It seemed I could never pick up the practice of silence or waiting at home when other demands were weighing heavily.

Today, Mr Nouwen shed some much needed light on this subject, and with words more eloquent than mine, here are his thoughts on waiting:

Daily Meditations
Written by Henri Nouwen

Waiting with Patience

How do we wait for God? We wait with patience. But
patience does not mean passivity. Waiting patiently is not
like waiting for the bus to come, the rain to stop, or the
sun to rise. It is an active waiting in which we live the
present moment to the full in order to find there the signs
of the One we are waiting for.

The word patience comes from the Latin verb patior
which means "to suffer." Waiting patiently is suffering
through the present moment, tasting it to the full, and
letting the seeds that are sown in the ground on which we
stand grow into strong plants. Waiting patiently always
means paying attention to what is happening right before our
eyes and seeing there the first rays of God's glorious
coming.