Last Sunday Ally shared a quote from the poet Gideon Heugh: “Advent is where we actually live — not in the arrival but in the waiting.” I wrote it down and have thought about it all week because it echoed a story I just heard.
In the story, a reporter is sitting in on a second-grade class in New York. The teacher, Ms. Maria, is introducing a lesson — one apparently common in elementary classrooms — called “What’s in the box?”
She gathers the kids in a circle and holds up a plain white cardboard box about the size of a shoebox. She tells them that whatever is inside isn’t breakable, so they can shake it, smell it, tilt it — anything short of damaging it — to try to figure out what’s hidden inside.
The kids dive in with full second-grade enthusiasm. The guesses roll out: Legos, a stapler, a toy with gumballs. The box goes around the circle once, then twice, then a third time. Still no correct answer.
And then… Ms. Maria simply puts the box away.
“All right. Cool. Well, thank you for playing.”
WHAT?! You’re not going to tell us what it is?! (I’ll be honest — I’m right there with those second graders. Tell me what’s in the box!) But no. Ms. Maria tells the students she wants them to “learn how to endure the discomfort of not knowing.”
And that has stayed with me all week. Because it really is incredibly hard not to know.
Not to know whether you’ll be chosen for the job.
Not to know whether someone you love will finally find freedom from something they’ve long struggled with.
Not to know whether the cancer will return.
Waiting is not a small thing. It’s not theoretical. It’s not passive. It isn’t just a second-grade school lesson — it’s a lesson we spend our whole lives trying to practice. Heugh is right. This is the human condition: living in the space between what we hope for and what we understand, between what we pray for and what we can see. Sometimes the answers truly are beyond us — either because they won’t arrive in our lifetime, or because only God’s perspective could ever make sense of them.
After the class ended, Ms. Maria told the reporter that a previous group of students once revolted after the lesson. “The most trustworthy kids told her there was a plumbing emergency in the girls’ bathroom while another classmate snuck into the office Ocean’s Eleven–style.” They simply had to know.
And honestly? I get it. I think most of us do. When faced with what we cannot know or control, we often feel a pull to take matters into our own hands — to assume the one in charge has overlooked something or can’t be trusted, and to go searching for our own answers.
But I think God invites us into another way: to trust, even with trembling, that the One in charge is good. Not a shallow or forced trust, and not one that pretends things aren’t hard — because life can be excruciating. I don’t know all that each of you is carrying, but I do know that some of us — maybe all of us — are carrying very heavy weight right now. And still, scripture insists that God has not abandoned the work, even when the path looks nothing like what we expected, and even when we can’t imagine how anything good could be taking shape.
Heugh writes: “We dwell not in the revelation and the reward, but in the in-between. We can be found most often not at a destination, but on the way there — or setting off again because we didn’t find what we were looking for. To be human is to search; to reach for; to be in the process of.”
Advent reminds us that God meets us there — in the uncertainty, in the longing, in the honest ache of not yet knowing. God does not stand at a distance, waiting for us to arrive at clarity or resolution. God comes close in the in-between. We are not alone in the waiting. I am so deeply grateful to be holding this in-between with you all.
Holly