A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI
From Advent to Elevator Lines — How Our Culture Has Forgotten How to Wait
“Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.” — Psalm 37:7
When Waiting Was a Way of Life
There was a time when waiting was not merely tolerated but woven into the rhythm of existence. Farmers waited for rain. Sailors waited for wind. Lovers waited for letters.
The seasons themselves were teachers: spring could not be hurried, nor autumn postponed. Life moved at the deliberate pace of the earth’s turning and the slow ripening of fruit. Waiting was not a failure of efficiency — it was a form of participation in something larger than the self.
The Vanishing of the Pause
Now, in the age of instant everything, we have nearly erased the pause between desire and fulfillment. A click delivers food. A swipe delivers companionship. A search delivers what once required long afternoons in a library.
The gap between wanting and having — once the birthplace of reflection and gratitude — has collapsed. Even elevators and loading screens seem intolerable to minds trained for constant refresh.
“The very technologies that promise to save us time can rob us of the capacity to inhabit it.”
Patience, once a virtue, has become a problem to be solved. Queues are no longer rituals of shared humanity but inconveniences to be “optimized.” Every delay feels like a defect. Yet in the rush to eliminate waiting, we lose our ability to live within time rather than merely move through it.
When Waiting Was Sacred
The old world understood that some things can only arrive through time. Advent, for example, is not a countdown to Christmas shopping but a season of holy anticipation — a training in longing.
The Church calendar, the harvest cycle, even the once-slow postal service invited the soul into a rhythm of expectation. A letter’s arrival was a small revelation. A field’s fruit was a covenant fulfilled. Liturgy unfolded at the pace of prayer, teaching the faithful to savor words they already knew.
Waiting, then, was not just endurance. It was worship.
The Discipline of Time
Waiting is not passive. It is an act of faith — an acknowledgment that we are not in control. To wait well is to resist the tyranny of immediacy and the illusion of omnipotence.
“The discipline of waiting refines desire; it burns away impatience until only longing remains.”
The impatient heart uproots what it plants. The waiting heart endures until fruit appears. In that endurance, time becomes a teacher rather than an enemy. Waiting trains the will in humility, attention, and hope — the very qualities that modern life quietly erodes.
The Revelation in the Delay
Every moment of waiting — from a red light to a hospital corridor, from Advent candles to grief itself — holds the potential of revelation. The silence before a song. The breath before an answer. The stillness before dawn.
These are not wasted moments but altars where time reveals its holiness.
To wait is to believe that what is coming is worth the time it takes. It is to trust that delay is not denial but design — that the slow work of God still moves unseen beneath the surface.
A Modern Benediction: “The Waiting Prayer”
Lord of the long horizon,
Teach me to rest between the notes.When I rush ahead, remind me
That Your seasons are never late.Let me find You
In the still line, the quiet breath,
The pause before the door opens.For waiting is not emptiness —
It is the place where hope learns to breathe.
On a personal note, the waiting is over for my sister, Carol. She passed away today, just minutes after the 11/11 11:11 am celebration time for our Veterans Day. After years of suffering, her time to celebrate coming face-to-face with Jesus arrived as a grand blessing. She is pain-free. God bless Carol and her family. LFM
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