Quotes about Waiting

Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespected hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent

Not everyone can wait: neither the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them.

The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

The blessedness of waiting is lost on those who cannot wait, and the fulfillment of promise is never theirs. They want quick answers to the deepest questions of life and miss the value of those times of anxious waiting, seeking with patient uncertainties until the answers come. They lose the moment when the answers are revealed in dazzling clarity.

Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other - things that are really of no consequence — the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside.

Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting—that is, of hopefully doing without—will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.

Slowly it gets to be a waiting whose outward sense I cannot comprehend; the inward reason must be found daily. Both of us have lost infinitely much during the past months; time today is a costly commodity, for who knows how much more time is given to us.7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Maria von Wedemeyer, 20 September 1943

Christ is knocking. It's still not Christmas, but it's also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ.

I believe that God is not timeless fate, but that he waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible deeds.

We say that religion is a matter of mood: we must wait until the mood strikes us. And then we often wait for years —perhaps until the end of our life—until we are once again in the mood to be religious. This idea is based on a great illusion. It is alll well and good to let religion be a matter of mood, but God is not a matter of mood. He is still present even when we are not in the mood to meet with him.

As I ponder this, I don't believe my greeting committee said, "Oh no, he doesn't get to stay." They're still there at the gate. They're waiting. For them, time is not passing. Everything is in the eternal now—even if I can't put that into words. Even if ten more years pass, or thirty, in heaven it will be only an instant before I'm back there again.