waiting

"God's waiting and man's," wrote the nineteenth-century British minister Alexander MacLaren, in a reflection on Isaiah 30:18.  How "bold and beautiful, that He and we should be represented as sharing the same attitude."  Here, then, is something of the mystery of incarnation: God's being like us is not limited to God's taking on feet and hands and hair.  God is like us in this posture of pause and expectancy and anticipation and longing and wondering where we are.  And so Advent is not only about our waiting for God, waiting for God to get born, waiting for God to come back.  It is also a time when we enter God's waiting, God's divine waiting.  And perhaps that is where the meaning of waiting gleams the most brightly of all.

--Lauren F. Winner, in the forward for The Meaning is in the Waiting, by Paula Gooder