Weekly Photo Challenge – Waiting

I’m participating in the Post a Week 2011 Photo Challenge.   Here’s how it works

Each week, the challenge provides a theme for creative inspiration. We take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog.

This week’s theme is waiting.  We are in the season of Advent, which is a time of hopeful waiting.

I heard this meditation read yesterday, and I found it quite beautiful it describes hopeful waiting.

“Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (our people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of ‘Everything is gonna be all right,’ but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle — and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.”

– Victoria Stafford (quoted by Parker Palmer, read by Krista Tippet on the American Public Media program “On Being”

 

A slightly different sort of waiting.

Richard and I waited for months for the opening of the newest Muppets movie.  We both grew up watching the Muppets, and nothing makes me laugh quite as much as them.  We were able to see it at Midnight the morning it opened.  We each received a poster at the door.  In an odd way, this poster is sort of Advent-like too.

Like the Muppets, God is closer than we think.  In situations where peace seems impossible, peace is about to break through.  In situations where hope is lost, hope is about to break through.  He’s closer than you think.