Waiting for Christmas instead of Making it Happen

I was given a book with readings for Advent recently for my birthday (thanks Ashley!) and the reading for Nov. 28 was by Henri Nouwen and is about waiting. He discusses how Mary and Elizabeth went through their pregnancies expectantly (pardon the pun) waiting and supporting each other in that waiting period. He also points out how this was not passive and was hopeful for a promise to be fulfilled, but in our age we view waiting as passive and as the very opposite of hope. Hope has to do with making a plan, doing it, and hoping it works, not with waiting. As he says in the reading, 'We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this does not happen we are disappointed..we want to do the things that will make the desired event take place.' We want to take charge, make it happen!

Clearly there are times when we should take action. As C.S. Lewis has noted, some things only happen by our work. Our hands will not come clean by praying for them to come clean: we must go wash them. The dinner will not get prepared by praying for dinner: we must get up to cook it. But Lewis also points out that while some things only get done by our work some things only get done by prayer. Some only get done by marriage and family. Some only get done by humility and waiting.

It  struck me in reading this that some areas of our lives have clear boundaries and others do not. In my work in R&D we are limited by the laws of physics and chemistry. No matter how often Marketing says, 'just go invent something: here is some money, go invent' that does not change the boundaries. Once we find an area of technology that looks to have promise for our applications, we are still bounded by what it can do within it's boundaries. We can only go where the technology is able to go. That may not be where the business wanted to go.  In that sense we often 'wait' for the next thing, the breakthrough. Waiting is forced on us by our boundaries. This seems foreign to some other functions, though, where they decide to 'make it happen' and put on an ad campaign, run coupons, offer incentives, and so on. Money seems to be the only limit or boundary. But in science, more money will not necessarily get you where you want to go. You may need to wait, or you may need to realize it can't be done.

Many of us bring our 'make it happen' approach to Christmas. We will not take time to seek the Lord, to contemplate His coming, to make room in our hearts for that Coming to be refreshed in us. We just make it happen:  we decorate, buy gifts, cook, send cards, go to events, and so on. But I, for one, need to wait, to set aside some time to just wait. Expectantly.