Waiting for God

Many people think of prayer as talking to God, but the image of waiting for God suggests that we ought rather to think of prayer primarily as listening, patiently, for God's leading to become clear. Many in our time are realizing that this posture of attentive waiting for the leading of the Spirit is absolutely critical to our personal and communal well-being. People are realizing that they need to wait for the Spirit’s leading because often what it means to live a fully human life is not immediately obvious. We need to wait for the Spirit’s leading because we may have lost the things that once gave our lives stability and direction and purpose, and we need to grieve their loss and wait for new stability and direction and purpose to emerge. We need to wait for the Spirit’s leading all the time because it is too easy to get caught up in conventional patterns of life that are safe and familiar, but unsatisfying, even oppressive, and we may not be able to recognize that or to see a way beyond it until we have waited for God. Like Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, the road to wholeness often comes through rejecting the safe, conventional way, and following what Robert Frost called “the road less travelled.”