Waiting: passionate, vibrant, contemplative work

   "One day, while I was reading in the Gospels, it occurred to me that when important times of transition came for Jesus, he entered enclosures of waiting—the wilderness, a garden, the tomb. Jesus' life was a balanced rhythm of waiting on God and expressing the fruits of that waiting.

   "I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means 'to endure.' Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely, It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision."

(Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions. HarperSanFranscisco, 1990. 14.)