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<h5 style="padding-left: 330px;">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/amylovesyah/">Amy Loves Yah</a></h5>
I love the feeling of anticipation. There are many things, big and small, that I anticipate, but nothing encompasses the feeling quite like Advent—that season when waiting is perfectly wrapped in anticipation, and presented as the best of gifts.

<strong>Anticipation is what makes the waiting delicious, satisfying and bearable.</strong>

As a child, lighting Advent candles, creating a handmade Advent calendar, and following the well-worn path of other rituals and traditions leading up to Christmas worked its magic on me. The anticipation and excitement built until I could hardly stand it, culminating at the Christmas Eve service, in a sanctuary full of candle light and beloved Christmas hymns. Each year, the service at my home church ends with Silent Night, perfectly timed so the final acapella verse—"Jesus Lord at thy birth"—fades at midnight...a pause...then the organ triumphantly begins its postlude, the lights are turned on, and everyone hugs, exclaiming "Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!" <em>That</em> was the moment I had been waiting for.

Later, as a college student, I waited for that moment when my last final exam was handed in and I could hurry through the Michigan winter back to my dorm room, finish packing, and head home. The date was on my calendar, and my parents knew in advance exactly when to pick me up. After college, I counted down weeks and days to my wedding. Five years later, I owned a book that described, week by week, exactly how the baby in my womb was forming—the ears are fully formed, and the toes, now the baby has finger nails and knows how to suck!

Waiting. Anticipating. Counting down the days to a known end-point, a known result: <em>Christmas will come. Exam week will end. This baby will be born.</em>
<h4>A less certain type of waiting</h4>
Now, as I reflect on the idea of "waiting" at the start of this Advent season, it feels like a different creature, one void of the comforting certainty that breeds anticipation.

Sure, there are still specific moments I wait for with anticipation: our upcoming trip to visit my family for the holidays, the completion of a work project, the vacation we're planning for the summer. <strong>So much of my waiting, though, has become more complex. I wait for a sign, for a change of heart. I wait for inspiration and direction, for complete healing and reconciliation. I wait for the life I live each day to align with the life I envision in my head and crave in my soul.</strong>

<strong>In other words, the things I <em>really</em> find myself waiting for can't be marked on the calendar.</strong>

There aren't four candles to light, one each week, as I grow nearer to that point of arrival. There isn't that building of excitement as the moment inevitably draws close. The anticipation is stripped away, and I'm left with the waiting—periods of hope clouded by periods of doubt: <em>Am I waiting for the right things? </em><em>Am I hoping for too much? Will I even know when the waiting is over?</em>
<h4>Promises to fuel our waiting</h4>
As I sat in church this first Sunday of Advent, though, I realized that's exactly the kind of waiting we're actually doing, as Christians. I mean, it's important that we observe Advent as a journey toward December 25, the specific day we celebrate God becoming flesh and dwelling among us. It's important to teach our children that waiting can be exciting and so rewarding, and to demonstrate it with wreaths of candles and special calendars with small doors to open, gradually revealing the full picture.

But it's that full picture—the really big one—that we're actually waiting for. <strong>We're waiting for things on earth to be as they are in heaven, and we don't have a date on the calendar for that, any more than I have a date for when I'll stop feeling hurt about difficult things in my past.</strong>

It's true, sometimes it feels like the most futile of waiting games. We do have God's promises, though. One of the scriptures read at my church yesterday was Jeremiah 33:19-26, where God tells Jeremiah that he can count on God's covenant promises as much as Jeremiah counts on the rising of the sun following each night.

<strong>Those promises take what seems so abstract and uncertain in our waiting, and wraps it in the kind of anticipation we need to keep moving forward in hope.</strong>

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<em>This post will be a part of a series at Christine Sine's blog <a href="http://godspace.wordpress.com/">Godspace</a>: What Are We Waiting For This Advent? If you're celebrating Advent or would like to learn more about it, you should definitely check it out.</em>