Summary
In this talk, Dr. Andrew Swafford explores the seasons of waiting that touch all our lives—times of anticipation, patience, and sometimes struggle, and encourages us to view waiting as an opportunity to deepen our trust in God’s timing and faithfulness. He invites us to examine our hopes, anxieties, and longings, and to see how we might cultivate a spirit of joyful expectancy rooted in God’s promises.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
“The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. ”
Lamentations 3:25
1. The Seasons of waiting we experience in this life are often waiting for something goodor waiting through something bad. What are you waiting for this Advent season? What are you excited about? What is bringing you anxiety?
2. If you are in a difficult season of waiting, do you believe that consolation will soon return? How can you shift your mindset to more fully believe that God is faithful?
3 .When you experience seasons of waiting, do you experience joy–the confidence that comes from knowing God is at work? What is holding you back from that experience?
4. In what or whom do you place your hope? Do you desire God more than you desire any earthly good? Do you have the courage to hope for an earthly good only if it brings you closer to Jesus? What might be holding you back and how can you seek to remedy this during this season of Advent?
Text: Seasons of Waiting
Hello, friends, I am Dr. Swafford here from Benedictine College in in Atchison, Kansas, and I just want to talk to you about seasons of waiting. But first, let’s begin in prayer.
Hail Mary
In the name of God and Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen. Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, pray for us. In the name of the Father and the Son, Holy Spirit, amen.
Think About Your Moments of Waiting
So, seasons of waiting, this could be, as we know, waiting for something good, we’re waiting through something bad. First on the good side, I mean, think about as we go into the season of advent, think about things that you’re excited about, think about how much it means to prepare, prepare our hearts, prepare our minds. Think about preparing for a meeting, right? I mean, it goes a lot better if you prepare and if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail as they say. Getting ready for mass, I mean, how many times, you know, I know none of us are perfect, but if you read the readings before you get to mass, don’t we always get more out of it?
Or how about preparing to see a friend that you haven’t seen for a while and you start thinking about them and their life and their heart, and the last time you talked to them and the issues and the concerns that they had and you start wondering, “I wonder how this is going, or this is going, or this is going.” That’s often incredibly meaningful to the other person and it changes our encounter with them when we’re with them, when we have prepared thought about it beforehand, we didn’t just show up and just kind of fly by the seat of our pants, we prepared.
And so much of the liturgy really is reliving the story of Israel and the story of Christ, right? So in Advent, we prepare for the great coming of the Messiah. In those preparation moments, there’s a purification, there’s a preparation, there’s a readiness, there’s often a fasting, same thing. And then the joy of Christmas, the great joy of the epiphany, of the wise men coming, in Lent, the preparation, the fasting, we go out into the wilderness with Jesus, who himself is reliving the story of Israel, and then the joy of Easter and the joy of Pentecost, and this kind of ebb and flow of human life.
Think about the waiting of an engaged couple. It’s like their Moses on mountain Nebo, just, there’s the promised land, we’re already there, but not yet. And that can be an exciting time, but a challenging time as well. And then in other times, you know, we’re waiting through something that’s a trial, something that’s hard. There are seasons in life, my friends, there are seasons in life, and I think that is really helpful to kind of keep in mind because I don’t know about you, but in my experience going through especially the tough times, our imagination will bury us. We tell ourselves, “It’ll always be like this, it’ll never change, I’m just stuck in this rut forever.” But if we think of those times as seasons, then we realize this is a winter, but winter will give way to spring. That bolsters our confidence, that gives us signs of hope, even if it’s still there, even if the winter is still before us, it tends to not bury us as much if we recognize it as a season and not a permanent condition.
Patience & Courage of a Martyr and a Saint
This reminds me of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in his rules for overcoming desolation. One of the things he says, within a time of desolation, a time of spiritual desolation, we feel like the Lord is far, He’s distant, I can’t hear his voice, what do I do? He actually challenges us to believe that consolation will return soon. Just that moment of believing that constellation will return soon. And when we do that, it starts to slowly subtly, but break the chains of desolation, that just the very notion that this is not permanent, that is temporary, loosens the evil one’s grip upon our minds and our hearts, and takes us out of that despair that we so easily fall into all of us. And the thing is, it doesn’t take much, if you feel like this always going to be like this, it could be a paper cut and that just buries us, or it could be something much, much, much more severe. In the end, what we’re talking about really is caught up with the virtue of hope and waiting.
In fact, in the Hebrew Scriptures in the Old Testament, there’s a number of words for where you see, like, “Wait upon the Lord, He will renew your strength.” And there’s a number of Hebrew roots that show up in those capacities, one is “Kawa”, which means to wait, to persevere, but there’s always an aspect of hope in the waiting. And it’s a waiting through suffering, there’s a confidence there though, and it really is attached to the virtue of hope. And one of the words for hope in Hebrew is “Tikvah. It’s the exact same word, so “Kawa”, to wait and “Tikvah”, hope.
This waiting is a persevering waiting, it’s a patient waiting. Even if it doesn’t feel optimistic at all, there’s a glimmer of hope, and this is where the virtue of hope is often connected to the virtue of courage, as is patience. So you think about courage, on one level, courage is the virtue by which we engage evil, we confront evil, the courage of a soldier. But there’s also an aspect of courage that has the strength to persevere through an evil that cannot be removed, through a suffering that cannot be removed. That’s the courage of a martyr.
And the thing is, when we lose our patience, is it not the case that we get discouraged, right? That language that we use that’s tapping into something, that courage and hope and patience go together, they go together. Again, not just the patience of a soldier, but the patience of a martyr. And it might not be a red martyrdom, it might be a, you know, “I’m just feel stuck. Stuck in my life, stuck in my life right now, buried in my circumstances, there’s just no way out.” And the thing is, this is the courage of a saint.
It’s one thing to white-knuckle it, it’s one thing to begrudgingly get through these things, and I’m speaking to myself, I promise, but what you see in the great saints is they can weather these things with joy, and not a joy that’s like a happy clappy, “Oh, things will be get better.” Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. A joy that has a deep confidence that despite appearances to the contrary, God is at work, God is at work, and in the end, this is really the source of our joy, this life is not my final end, this life is not my final destination. I love this life, I treasure this life. It is so full of richness and we absolutely have to appreciate that and love that and cherish that. But every good that we see, every good that we see in this earthly setting is, as we say in philosophy and theology is really a participatory good. What do I mean?
By participation I mean, it’s good, but it participates in, it shares in, it reflects a good beyond this life. Just as the moon doesn’t have its own light, it reflects and radiate the light of the sun, every earthly good is good, but it’s been given the gift of existence and it points beyond itself to the ultimate good, the infinite good, God Himself, the infinite good, the infinite truth who has a name, His name is Jesus Christ.
So the saints see this, people like St. Maxine Colby, witnesses describe the joy and the confidence he had in Auschwitz, not because it was necessarily going to get better, because as we know it didn’t get better. But he knew whose he was, our Lord’s, and he knew he had the confidence and the protection of the Immaculata, our blessed Virgin Mary, and that that’s the source of our joy, that’s the source of our confidence, that’s the source of our hope. Because it’s not simply an earthly thing, it’s not simply an earthly thing.
Can We Hope for Earthly Things?
Some of the, in the eastern tradition, they’ll speak of sorrow as a deadly sin. It’s like, “What do you mean by sorrow here?” Well, you don’t mean the emotional sadness, and you certainly don’t mean clinical depression, anything like that. What they mean by sorrow as a deadly sin is it’s an irrational sadness that loses sight of eternity, an irrational sadness that loses sight of eternity. So stoking our desire for heaven, our desire for, we desire infinite happiness. This is how the Lord made us, and this is how he draws us back to himself, not against our will, but through it, not against our desire, but through our desire. And this is the great challenge is to kind of order our desires.
So is it okay to hope for earthly things? Well, the answer’s yes, but we need to qualify this in our minds and our hearts and this is a great, great, great, great challenge. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, will say, we really ought to only hope for eternal life, that our hope, the gift of the virtue of hope is what fuels our courage and fuels us for ultimate end. So can we hope for earthly things? Yes, absolutely, but it has to be qualified by, “I hope for this, Lord Jesus, provided that it’s conducive to my reach in my final end in you.”
And this is the great Christian test, “I hope for this, I want this, provided that it’s a step on the way toward you.” And do we have the courage, I’m talking to myself, I promise you all, do we have the courage, do we have the guts to say, “I really want this earthly good, I really want this thing, I want this thing to change, I want this thing to happen. But if it means the loss of you forever, if it means the loss of you for eternity, I don’t want it.” Can we say that, it is so hard and I know that’s a test of faith, but hope and courage and desire are inclining us to this final homeland in heaven itself, in union with our king, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in union with all the saints, with all the blessed and union with all the faithful departed, our loved ones who have gone before us, marked with a sign of Christ who have died in faith and hope and charity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So can we hope for earthly goods? Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course, of course, we hope and we pray provided that they’re conducive to our reach and our final end. And we hope for things for our loved ones. And this is so hard, “Lord, please let them pass this test, please let them get this job, please let them have this relationship work out.” Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, provided that it’s conducive to their reaching their final end in you.
See, to love is to will the good. The greatest love is to will the greatest good. As Saint John Paul II once said, “To really love is to will the infinite good for the other, and that is to will God for them.” And that is to say, if such an earthly good would ever take them away from God, I don’t want them to have it, and that’s hard, this is so hard. But it is by the light of faith, by the light of faith, this is the truth.
The Life of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine
So let’s just talk about a few examples of waiting. I think of our beloved Saint Monica, Saint Monica, mother of the wayward Saint Augustine. And the thing is, you know, we as readers, we read the confessions when we read about Augustine’s life and we hear the stories, like we know how the story ends, but there were years and years and years, some sixteen-ish years where Monica’s witnessing the wayward teenage Augustine 1617, just falling into all kinds of sins of unchastity and the like, goes off to school in Carthage, in northern Africa, big city, becomes a mannequin, so now he’s a heretic for some nine years.
And he, you know, I mean, for Saint Augustine at this time, like, his mother is embracing like the simpleton faith, like this is what, yeah, okay, that’s what like the people who just don’t know anybody believe, but the elite, the educated, you know, we have a little bit of Christian frosting, we say Christian words, but it’s this gnostic Manichean thing, but here’s the key, as Augustine tells us, that allows him to live the life that he wants to live and have a little spiritual frosting on top of it. It’s sort of like an early form of, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” “I can tap into this spiritual dimension, but I want to be my own boss and I want to live the way I want to live.”
And Monica had to watch this for year after year after year, praying, praying, praying, tears and prayers, tears and prayers, many, many, many, many years until Augustine through a various sorts of events, comes back around, comes back to the Catholic faith, comes back to the Catholic fold, eventually becomes this great tremendous, not only priest, but bishop, doctor of the church and saint. It took a long time, took a long time.
Saint John Paul II’s Struggle
I also think about Saint John Paul II and the struggle against communism. You know, World War II is the war that Paul say they lost twice. You know, just, you know, the attack, the onslaught from Germany, got Russia from the other side, and then after World War II just kind of handed over to the Russians, John Paul II comes onto the scene in 1949, he’s stationed at St. Florian’s, this is his, well, he’s got another parish first outside of Krakow, but he is stationed in Krakow 1949 March at St. Florian’s. This the beginning of his college outreach. He’s reaching out to young people in the midst of atheistic Communistic Poland. And this is the beginnings of what’s going to become World Youth Day. The things that happen there as he’s evangelizing these youth, as he’s bringing them into the fullness of life and thought and God and Jesus and marriages are happening, and he really, he’s creating small forms of cultural resistance, he’s creating the beginnings of generations that can resist the onslaught ideologically of communism, this onslaught of, “You don’t need God, have as much sex as you want, have abortions.”
Wait on the Lord, He Will Renew Your Strength
Sound familiar? It is, it’s very familiar but my point is this, it’s going to be some 40 years from that point before the Berlin Wall falls, it’s going to be a lot, it’s going to be decades before he sees the fruit of his labors. There’s so many things in life, friends, where this is what it takes, what it takes is just continuing to show up when we don’t feel like it. This is what makes a saint, this is what makes greatness, is just continuing to show up when we don’t feel like it, when you don’t see the fruit, you know, take evangelization for example. Like we sometimes we’re working with someone, sometimes it’s a family member and it’s day after day, month after month, year after year, we’re like, “Where’s the fruit?” And the thing is, we just don’t know where we fall in the story, we don’t know where we are in the story.
And just hypothetically, imagine for evangelization purposes, it’s going to take this person 14 encounters with like a rockstar Catholic who’s on fire, who loves Jesus, who loves them, who’s dynamic and full of life. You don’t know if you’re number 2 or if you’re number 13, you just keep hacking at that tree and let the Holy Spirit do the rest. Just show up, be yourself, and recognize like this is not in our control at the end of the day, that we’ve got a part to play in the story that’s greater than what we can see. It’s like our lives are like a paragraph and a great novel, great book, and we just see a little part of it and we’re here to play our part, and the Lord will do the rest. And we trust, we don’t lose confidence, we don’t lose hope, and we don’t measure things by what it looks like, what we see, what it feels like because looks can be deceiving.
Wait upon the Lord, He will renew your strength. Israel waited for centuries for her Messiah. We wait for renewal within our own lives, our families, our nation. But the Lord throughout Scripture preserves a remnant, in the darkest of times, the light of faith never is snuffed out. Do not despair, do not despair. Do not despair because of the news, do not despair because of our own families, just play our part, do not despair. You and I are not made for this life, there’s no utopia here. We do our part, we cherish the good, we love the good, we water the good, we make it the best we possibly can, but in the end as say John the 23rd who you know, called Vatican to you said, “Lord, I have to wash my hands of it, Lord, it’s your church, it’s your church.” We do our part, we do with a smile, we do with joy, but you and I know we are not made for this life in the end, and this is the source of our joy, because Jesus Christ has conquered, Jesus Christ will not fail us, not in this life or the next, but looks are deceiving. So stay the course, just keep showing up. I’ll be praying for you and please pray for me. God bless you. Take care.
About Dr. Andrew Swafford
Dr. Andrew Swafford is Professor of Theology at Benedictine College. He is a national speaker and co-author of Gift and Grit: How Heroic Virtue Can Change Your Life and Relationships, A Catholic Guide to the Old Testament, and What We Believe: The Beauty of the Catholic Faith. He is also general editor and contributor to Ascension’s Great Adventure Catholic Bible. Among his other publications are Ascension’s Bible studies on Romans and Hebrews, Spiritual Survival in the Modern World, and John Paul II to Aristotle and Back Again. Andrew holds a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of St. Mary of the Lake and a master’s degree in Old Testament & Semitic Languages from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is an avid student of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and lives with his wife Sarah and their six children in Atchison, Kansas. You can find more information about Andrew at theswaffords.com or on X @andrew_swafford.