Thought for the Week

We hate waiting.

We hate red lights, we hate queuing in the supermarket (“do you really need to pricecheck that orange, just let them have it” we think), test results take forever to arrive, the broadband is too slow (“aaargh, buffering again”). It feels like such a waste of time and often there is nothing we can do to make things go quicker.

We are in the season of Advent, a time of year when Christians think about what we are waiting for at Christmas.

If we are young then it’s probably a present that we are waiting for. If we’re older we’re probably just looking forward to a break and not having to cope with the pressure of the dayto-day. Quite often it’s actually Boxing Day and not Christmas Day that we are really looking forward to.

There is actually something really important about waiting because it forces us to think about what we are really waiting for. The characters in the first Christmas story were often waiting for a baby to arrive but actually what they were really looking forward to was the day when things got sorted: the country got sorted out, the people got their relationship with God sorted out, the economy got sorted, the inequality gap got sorted.

There was probably something about all that waiting that made them think about what it was that they were really waiting for.

So next time you are stuck in traffic or desperate for the person ahead of you in the selfservice queue to get a move on use that waiting time to think about what it is that you are really hoping for.

It’s when we do that that waiting stops being a nuisance and starts becoming a gift. Neil Glover Flemington Hallside Church