Why so long?

Advent (the four Sundays before Christmas) is a time of waiting.

I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered, why did God take so long? God made promises to Abraham but then Jewish history meandered for 2000 years until Jesus came.

One thought is that through that long wait everything had been tried –slavery, empire, exile; theology, literature, philosophy– but nothing had been found to satisfy the human soul or give coherence to the human story. History’s crayon, like a brass-rubbing, only revealed the outlines of a missing King.

God made us wait. Perhaps that should still be an intentional component of our lives. Surely we can be too hasty, casual, or on autopilot in our approach to God.  Perhaps next time we are stuck in a long night of insomnia, or even waiting for a bus, we can re-use the time and redirect our thoughts to seek to know him better, to love him, to meet him.

I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion;
    therefore I will wait for him.’ (Lamentations 3:24, in the Old Testament)