“I wait for Yahweh. My soul waits. I hope in his word. My soul longs for the Lord more than watchmen long for the morning; more than watchmen for the morning.”
Nobody is good at waiting anymore. We have built a world designed to remove it. Two-day shipping, skip the ad, fast forward, order ahead. When something makes us wait, we treat it as a malfunction.
So it is worth noticing that the season leading to Christmas is not called Arrival. It is called Advent, which means coming. It is a season about something that has not happened yet.
The psalm gives us a picture for it. A watchman on the wall through the last hours of the night. He is not doing anything dramatic. He cannot make the sun rise faster. He is simply awake, facing east, watching the horizon where he knows the light will appear. And the writer says his longing for God is deeper than that.
That is a fair description of a certain kind of prayer. Not the prayer where you have the words. The kind where you have run out of them, and all that is left is waiting with your face turned toward where the light comes from.
Maybe you are in a season of that right now. Waiting on a test result, a job, a child to come home, a marriage to soften, an addiction to break its grip. You have prayed all the words you have. Now you are just watching the horizon.
Here is what the watchman knows that makes his waiting bearable. Morning is not a maybe. He is not hoping the sun might rise. He is waiting for something certain that has not arrived yet.
That is what we are doing this month. Not wishing. Waiting on a promise from someone who keeps them.
Talk About It Together
Take your time with these. Do not rush to make each other feel better.
- What are you waiting on right now that you cannot hurry?
- How do you usually handle waiting? Do you get busy, get angry, or go numb?
- What would it look like to wait facing the right direction instead of just enduring it?
Tonight’s Challenge
Name out loud the one thing you are waiting on, and ask God for it plainly, without adding a speech about why it may not happen.
Prayer
Lord, we are not good at waiting. We want answers now and we get restless and discouraged when they do not come. Teach us the patience of the watchman, awake and facing the right direction. Where we have run out of words, receive our waiting as prayer. Bring the morning. Amen.