The First Sunday in Advent-
Can You Hardly Wait?

Take the following from Dan Clendenin which was originally linked on The Text This Week:

We wait in patience knowing that not every act of God reverberates like a pounding sledge hammer. In Isaiah's metaphor, God does not always split open the heavens. Whereas even His closest disciples longed to call down fire from heaven and to brandish swords, Jesus compared his coming kingdom to tiny mustard seeds and to the imperceptible but certain fermentation of yeast.
--from The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Reflections By Dan Clendenin

Add this from Charles Moore over at Bruderhof.com

The love that descended to Bethlehem is not the easy sympathy of an avuncular God, but a burning fire whose light chases away every shadow, floods every corner, and turns midnight into noon. This love reveals sin and overcomes it. It conquers darkness with such forcefulness and intensity that it scatters the proud, humbles the mighty, feeds the hungry, and sends the rich away empty-handed (Luke 1:51-53).

Because a transformation of this scale can never be achieved by human means, but only by divine intervention, Advent (to quote Bonhoeffer again) might be compared to a prison cell "in which one waits and hopes and does various unessential things... but is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside." It is a fitting metaphor. But dependency does not release us from responsibility. If the essence of Advent is expectancy, it is also readiness for action: watchfulness for every opening, and willingness to risk everything for freedom and a new beginning.

With the two you have a pretty good idea of what Christian Waiting is to be all about. It is an active awareness of expectation of something happening- and soon. It is an active participation on watching for the next open door. It is not the passive, pack-your-bags-and-sit waiting for the heavens to open and to be taken away. We're had 2000 years of waiting so far and that way didn't get anything done.

Active waiting is like active listening. It is focused, not distracted. Active waiting reads and prays to be ready for whatever happens next. You see, one of the things I have discovered over my decades of waiting is that if I keep on sitting around waiting for The Big Day, I'm going to miss Jesus coming in the little, smaller ways that He arrives in my life each and every day. Active waiting keeps me from going into each day with assumptions about what God wants and how God is going to do it.

It leaves me ready to be surprised by Jesus each and every day. For that I am deeply grateful and I don't end up getting stuck in a rut or missing out all together when He does show up.