Waiting When Waiting Itself Becomes the Hard Part
An Advent Reflection
Advent means arrival.
And yet, every year, Advent begins not with arrival, but with waiting.
This is not accidental. Christianity does not rush to resolution. It trains its people to live in the in-between: between promise and fulfilment, longing and gift, prayer and silence.
I have spent a long time in that space.
Not a brief pause. Not a season with a clear arc. But a prolonged middle where nothing visibly resolves, and the passing of time itself begins to feel like a threat.
For a while, I assumed this meant my faith was faltering. If waiting felt unbearable, surely something was wrong with my hope, my trust, or my posture before God.
Only recently have I begun to see the distinction more clearly:
sometimes it is not hope or trust that is under strain.
Sometimes it is waiting itself.
Waiting Is Not Neutral
In Christian imagination, waiting is often spoken of gently, even reverently. But biblically, waiting is not calm by default. The Hebrew word qāwâ carries the image of tension — like a cord pulled tight. Waiting stretches. It strains. It holds competing forces together.
Scripture does not treat prolonged waiting as a mild inconvenience.
It recognises it as destabilising.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12).
Not hope denied. Deferred.
Advent names this honestly. Israel waited not for days or months, but for centuries — living faithfully without knowing when, how, or even if deliverance would come in their lifetime.
Waiting, in Scripture, is not softened by holiness.
It is sharpened by time.
Advent: Waiting for an Arrival You Cannot Produce
Advent reminds us of something uncomfortable:
God’s arrival cannot be scheduled, managed, or accelerated.
The Messiah does not come because Israel waited well enough.
He comes because God is faithful to God’s promise.
This matters because it reframes waiting. We are not waiting as a technique to trigger divine action. We are waiting because arrival belongs to God, not to us.
This is where the distinction between “waiting for an outcome” and “waiting for God” becomes more than wordplay.
Waiting for an outcome places the weight of meaning on arrival.
Waiting for God places the weight of meaning on presence — even before arrival.
Both acknowledge divine agency.
Only one allows faithfulness to continue without guarantees.
Advent does not ask us to pretend we do not care about the outcome. It asks us to learn how to live before it arrives.
When Waiting Itself Is Under Threat
There are seasons when hope wavers or trust feels thin. But there is another, quieter struggle: when the ability to keep waiting begins to erode.
This happens when:
there is no clear horizon,
no way to interpret time as progress,
and no assurance that endurance will be rewarded.
The nervous system experiences time not as neutral delay, but as pressure.
This is why waiting can feel like a roller-coaster that does not end. The ups and downs are familiar; the lack of an exit is what exhausts.
Advent does not deny this exhaustion. It dignifies it.
Israel’s waiting was not marked by uninterrupted confidence. It was marked by lament, doubt, protest, and hope that refused to die — even when deferred.
Lament: The Language of Advent Waiting
Advent is not quiet optimism. It is ache held open.
Lament belongs here because lament is what keeps waiting from becoming corrosive.
Lament does three things at once:
It names time as painful, not merely inconvenient.
It refuses false closure.
It keeps the relationship with God open.
This is why lament repeats itself. Repetition is not regression; it is maintenance.
Many psalms of lament end without resolution because the situation itself had not resolved. Scripture preserves these prayers because unresolved waiting is not a failure of faith, it is one of its most honest expressions.
To lament again is not to move backward.
It is to remain engaged.
When Lament Sustains and When It Harms
Not all repetition is life-giving. Lament sustains when it remains addressed— spoken to God, even when God feels silent.
Lament becomes harmful when it collapses into closed loops: when prayer becomes rumination, when language hardens into absolutes, when speech no longer expects to be heard.
The diagnostic question is simple, but searching:
After lamenting, am I more open or more defended?
Advent does not rush us past this discernment. It teaches us to wait truthfully, not stoically.
God’s Arrival Does Not Always End the Waiting
Here is the Advent paradox:
God arrives — and waiting does not end (at least not yet).
Christ comes, and yet we still wait.
For healing. For restoration. For the world to be set right.
Advent reminds us that God’s action is not limited to resolution. Sometimes God acts by entering the waiting itself.
Jesus is not born into a solved world.
He is born into Roman occupation, fragile bodies, deferred hopes, and ordinary faithfulness.
“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”
This is not doubt in the Father’s goodness.
It is obedience that remains costly — carried out in sorrow, without immediate deliverance.
Faithfulness in the In-Between
So what does faithfulness look like when waiting itself is fraying?
Not heroic endurance. Not spiritual performance.
Often, it looks small.
It looks like:
shortening the horizon to today,
legitimizing exhaustion without moralizing it,
returning to the same prayer without trying to improve it.
Sometimes faithfulness sounds like this:
“Lord, I am still here, but staying is costing me more than before.”
Advent does not require more than that.
It requires presence.
Even Here
Advent teaches us to wait not because waiting is good, but because God comes.
And until God arrives as we long for Him to,
we wait with Him.
Even here.