On Waiting

No backstory here, just an excerpt. Perhaps i'll provide some context in due time when the current period of waiting is over...

My soul waits. Another will is greater, wiser, and more intelligent than my own. So I wait. Waiting means that there is another whom I trust and from whom I receive. My will, important and essential as it is, finds a will that is more important, more essential. While waiting, I discover that there is more reality outside me than inside me, and I take up a positon to respond to it. I begin to pray by attempting to manipulate the will of God; I end by putting myself in a position to be moved by his will. There is a kind of waiting that has nothing to do with prayer: opportunistic waiting-a predatory, disciplined holding back until everything is right for me to pounce. This is the waiting of a cat stalking a bird or of a person cannily watching for the opening thrust, the telling word. That is not prayer-waiting. In prayer we are aware that God is in action and that when the circumstances are ready, when others are in the right place and when my heart is prepared, he will call me into the action. Waiting in prayer is a disciplined refusal to act before God acts. Waiting is our participation in the process that results in the "time fulfilled."

-From Eugene Peterson's Where Your Treasure Is...easily one of my new favorite books