Hold Your Taters!

Each Christmas season, we sing together, “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus”, ushering in the Advent season.  It is a reminder of those silent years between the Old and New Testaments (over 400 years, just to be clear!).  Generation after generation waited for the Messiah.  One might wonder if they ever felt hopeless?  

For the first time in our generation, we have found ourselves in a period of waiting, truly waiting. And we don’t do it well.  This inability to remain in place should have been a skill acquired and mastered long ago, but yet, here we are, struggling together.  Some of us more than others.

My grandmother, a strong, intelligent woman, who had very little opportunities in life for herself, focused her efforts on teaching her grandchildren.  We learned writing skills, reading, sewing etc. But a lesson particularly difficult for a left-handed, highly inquisitive (she said nosey) child was learning to wait patiently.  Over and over she would say to me, “Hold your taters”, an old saying with an unknown origin.  What she was trying to impart was that sometimes there is a need to wait, to be patient, to hold still.  What I learned was, “I DON’T HAVE TATERS!”  Continuously she tried; but the task of waiting never seemed natural to me.  I didn’t understand why I needed to learn that skill.

But yet, here we are in the greatest period of waiting ever imagined.  It is no longer a grandmother’s voice in my year, but God, Himself.  The Bible teaches us to, “ Be still and know that I am God.”  

It is in our earthly nature to move in order to do as we please, but it is in the waiting, in the stillness, that we see God.  It is in this silent communion that we gain understanding and direction for our lives.

Advent means “The Coming”.  Let us take this season of waiting to remember who is our King.  Let us remember He has a plan for us and He will come again. He’s got this!