“Celebrating Advent means learning how to wait.
Waiting is an art which our impatient age has
forgotten. We want to pluck the fruit before it has had
time to ripen. . . . The blessedness of waiting is lost on
those who cannot wait, and the fulfillment of promise is
never theirs. They want quick answers to the deepest
questions of life and miss the value of those times of
anxious waiting, seeking with patient uncertainties until
the answers come. They lose the moment when the
answers are revealed in dazzling clarity.”

from an Advent sermon by Deitrich Bonhoeffer,
December 2, 1928