What Are You Waiting For?

[Editor's note: This Advent season, we will be running a series of reflections on the Bread Blog from the San Francisco Theological Seminary. The reading for this post is Psalm 130. Keep reading Bread Blog for more Advent reflections.]

By Nicole Trotter

My hometown is suffering. I see it every day in the paper. While many continue to wait for shelter, wait for water, and wait for electricity, my teenagers have to be reminded what "Sandy" was while they wait for me to drive them somewhere.

Waiting has come to be known as patience. Patience elicits images of a quiet girl sitting with hands politely clasped, or the Dalai Lama. But when we need something, we participate in getting it. The world has never been changed through passive waiting. The world changes through relentless trouble makers who "cry from the depths" and keep their eyes wide open at night "like a sentry waits for dawn."

The psalmist was a New Yorker, I'm convinced. He doesn't politely ask for what he needs, he practically demands it. "Hear my voice!" He will wait. But not in the sense we usually think. He will wait, with full awareness, awake, in darkness, because he's sure the dawn will come. Make no mistake, he can't muscle or will the morning's light. None of us can. But we can actively participate in waiting for it. Because if we don't, we may fall asleep and miss the sunrise, we might find ourselves one day asking, "What was Sandy?" We may forget to change anything, to hope for anything passionately. What's more, we may forget that to hope requires something from us, something resembling a relentless troublemaker "crying out from the depths." When we need something desperately, hope consumes us with a God given passion so big that it cannot and should not be politely contained.