Waiting by Henri Nouwen

(This is kinda long, but so worth it. These are a bunch of quotes taken from an essay entitled "Waiting" by Henri Nouwen. I have the full essay if you're interested, just shoot me an email. Hopefully it speaks to you as it did to me.)


For many people waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.

Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are.

Now Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon and Anna are waiting for something new and good to happen to them.

Waiting, as we see it in the people on the first pages of the Gospel, is waiting with a sense of promise.

They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow. This is very important. We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more.

Second, waiting is active.

The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.
A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her.

For this reason, a lot of our waiting is not open-ended. Instead, our waiting is a way of controlling the future. We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this does not happen we are disappointed and can even slip into despair. That is why we have such a hard time waiting: we want to do the things that will make the desired events take place. Here we can see how wishes tend to be connected with fears.

Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes. Therefore, hope is always open-ended.

[Mary] trusted so deeply that her waiting was open to all possibilities. And she did not want to control them. She believed that when she listened carefully, she could trust what was going to happen.

We should wait together.

Elizabeth and Mary came together and enabled each other to wait. Mary’s visit made Elizabeth aware of what she was waiting for.

Mary affirmed Elizabeth’s waiting.

These two women created space for each other to wait. They affirmed for each other that something was happening that was worth waiting for.

Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment – that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the Christian life.