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waiting

“No ear has ever heard.  No eye has ever seen any God but You doing such deeds for those who wait for You.”

I want to talk about and do just a little bit of play on words here, because that is what the First Reading is doing from the Prophet.

He is using these two word deeds and wait.  Both of these words really have the contrary meaning.  I was looking it up in the dictionary to find out exactly what deeds meant.  Deeds are “to do or perform a certain action.”

That is what it means to do a deed; to do or perform an action.  What does it mean to wait?  Wait means “to delay from performing an action.”  One means doing an action and one means not doing, or waiting to do an action.

Think about that for a moment.

The Prophet is calling us to wait for God to perform an action.  He is actually saying if we wait and stop doing some kind of action, then we allow God to do an action.

I think the difficult thing for us is that we are so used to activity.  We are so used to doing something, or performing something, or completing something, or making life work.

You know, like we just work so hard at trying to make life work the way that we think it should.  And in reality God is the one that wants to do the working.  God is the one who wants to perform the deeds.  God is the one who wants to act.  But in order for Him to act, sometimes it means us not acting or us waiting.

I want you to think about the idea of waiting.  Maybe it is waiting in line at the grocery store.  Maybe it is waiting in traffic.  Maybe it is waiting back for test results.  Maybe it is waiting for something in your life to work out.

Is there anything in your life right now that you are waiting for?

Try to get in touch with what it means to wait for something.  Our tendency when we are waiting is to try to make that happen faster.  To try to do something to manipulate life so that we can end the waiting so we can get to the point.  So we can make it all happen faster.  But when we do that, oftentimes were circumventing God’s actions.  We were circumventing what God wants to do in our life.

When we wait, that is when we are surprised. That is when we discover God acting and, so much so, that the Prophet says, “No ear has ever heard.  No eye has ever seen any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait for Him.”

Certainly there is a time for acting, and there is a time for not acting.  The Advent Season allows us to actually get in touch and to try practice waiting.  It is so important that we do that for ourselves, because our default mode is acting.  We try to do.  We try fix.  We try to solve.  We try to manipulate.

God calls us to simply wait.

I just invite you to meditate on that, and to be aware of that during this Advent Season. That every time you have the opportunity to wait, God might just want to do something wonderful for you.

If you wait, the promise is, “Eye has not seen and ear has not heard the things that God will do for you.” 

Image Source: brian donovan