The Third Sunday of Advent brings us face to face with the challenge of patience.
Patience acts as a bridge between two of our deepest but conflicting desires: the desire for love, and the desire for control. The gap between things as they are and things as they ought to be is often too wide for us to inhabit with any real comfort, and that gap becomes a source of constant disturbance.
On one side of it lies despair, as the longing for change overwhelms us and the pain of disorder and dysfunction grows too great to bear. On the other side lies a vision of what God is going to do — but God has committed himself to doing it through the medium of time, and through our willingness to surrender our hearts to him.
