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As we prepare to enter Advent this Sunday you are invited to sit with this poem from Walter Brueggemann, that captures the strange tension of this season when we get to anticipate Christ’s coming, but yet still need the grace to let him come as and when he will.

The grace and the impatience to wait

In our secret yearnings
    we wait for your coming,
    and in our grinding despair
    we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
    we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
    and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church 
    in this season of hope
    which runs so quickly to fatigue
    and this season of yearning
    which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
    to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
    to the edges of our finger tips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
    and come in your weakness
    in any case
    and make all things new.
Amen.

(Poem from: Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann, Edited by Edwin Searcy, Fortress Press Minneapolis 2003. page 148.)

May God’s blessing be upon you today,
Dianne

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash