The Spiritual Practice of Waiting: What Advent Teaches All Year

I am a terrible waiter. In every sense of the word. I hate waiting in lines, I hate waiting for results, and I am not skilled at the spiritual practice of waiting on God. Advent ruined me, in the best way.

For most of my adult life, Advent was the church calendar's preamble to Christmas. Light the candles, sing the carols in minor keys, wait impatiently for the main event. I treated it like a countdown. Waiting as delay rather than waiting as practice.

Then I read a theologian who said something that stopped me: 'The people of Israel waited centuries for the Messiah. That waiting was not wasted time. It was the time during which they became the people who could receive Him.'

Becoming the people who could receive Him.

Waiting is not just the gap between promise and fulfillment. It is the formation period. It is where you become the kind of person who can hold what God is preparing to give you.

This reframed every season of waiting in my life. The three years I waited for my career to find its footing. The eighteen months my wife and I waited through infertility before our first child. The two years I spent in a church that felt wrong before we found one that felt like home. These weren't holding patterns. They were classrooms.

Isaiah 40:31 is one of the most quoted wait-verses: 'Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.' The renewal is not despite the waiting. It is through the waiting. The waiting is the mechanism.

The Hebrew word for 'wait' here is qavah — which also means to bind together, like a rope twisting strands. Waiting on God is a twisting together — your story and His story binding into something that neither strand could form alone.

In practical terms, waiting became less passive for me when I started asking 'what is available to me in this season that won't be available later?' In the waiting years before children, my wife and I had freedom and flexibility that disappeared afterward. Were we using it? In the years before career momentum, I had time to develop skills and read widely. Was I reading?

Waiting seasons have particular gifts. Gifts that require the waiting — they wouldn't be available in a faster life. Part of receiving those gifts is learning to look for them rather than being consumed by what isn't yet here.

Advent practices — the candles, the readings, the deliberate slowness — are technologies for learning to wait with intention rather than with anxiety. They mark time not as wasted but as purposeful. They say: something is coming, and this waiting is part of the story, not a delay before the story starts.

I try to bring that orientation to the non-Advent waits of my life. Because we are always, in some sense, in Advent — between promise and fulfillment, between what is and what is coming.