I have been much impacted by the Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot. It is a two-act play where two people (often portrayed as tramps) meet while waiting for someone named Godot to show up. He never does. But the conversations are deep and meaningful.
Many people throughout humankind must have thought that they were waiting for someone who never shows up. Maybe a parent? Maybe a lover? Maybe God?
Hugh Laurie, English actor, comedian, writer, musician, noted, “It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”
Here is another kind of waiting. It is the waiting to act before we feel ready. We are waiting to write the Great American Novel, but never get the pen or laptop out and begin writing. We will be a pastor or teacher or business leader—someday when we are ready. Some things we should not sit around waiting for the time to be right. I have seen people waiting for permission—from someone, anyone. We must seize the moment and do something.
Then there is waiting in anticipation. This I like the Jewish people waiting for The Anointed One, meaning King, Messiah in their language. Most of them pictured David returned to kick out the foreigners and re-establish the empire. Not being alive in the first century, I have no idea how prevalent this waiting, indeed longing, was among the Jewish people at large. Definitely it was among the more spiritually attuned. I have read histories that described that era as one of great spiritual longing. The success of Paul among the non-Jews shows that that longing was more widespread than just among the Jews.
I think of the stories in Luke about Anna and Simeon waiting at the Temple convinced that the baby who was the Anointed One would be brought to be dedicated. They were there not just years but decades. Waiting. And then Joseph and Mary brought little Joshua (Jesus in Greek and now English). And they knew. How? God obviously spoke to them. The waiting was over.
Advent as a season of the year to recreate that waiting, but instead of a political king a man who points us toward God with the invitation to enter God’s kingdom the kingdom of heaven. “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand (around us),” he said at the beginning of his ministry. Turn your life around because you, too, can live with God in the Kingdom. Beginning now.
We wait now. Then, we go and do for the wait is over.
Faith Venture 
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