The Gospel According to the Women Who Waited - The Women Who Still Wait

He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.  - (Luke 1:53)

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Advent is often framed as quiet anticipation - candles, carols, a gentle countdown to something holy. But scripture tells a different story. Advent is not passive. It is not polite. It is not silent. Advent is what happens when people prepare for transformation while still trapped inside systems that were never built for their survival.

The women of scripture did not wait in comfort. Mary waited under the shadow of empire, pregnant and vulnerable in a world where unwed motherhood could cost her everything. Elizabeth waited through decades of infertility, social shame, and silence. Anna waited through widowhood and poverty, keeping vigil in a temple that barely noticed her. Hagar waited in exile and scarcity, carrying a child while fleeing abuse and abandonment.

Their waiting was not empty time. It was full of labor, prayer, endurance, and defiance. It was holy because it demanded survival.

That same kind of waiting is happening right now.

Across prisons, shelters, motel rooms, reentry programs, courtrooms, and halfway houses, women are living Advent from the inside. They wait for news from home. For appeals to be heard. For paychecks that never quite stretch far enough. For visitation approvals. For housing lists to move. For freedom that keeps getting delayed by paperwork, policy, and punishment.

This is not abstract waiting. It is embodied. It has weight.

Mary’s “yes” still echoes in every young mother fighting stigma while trying to raise a child with limited resources and constant scrutiny. Elizabeth’s long faith lives on in elders who never stopped believing the world could change - women who still organize, still mentor, still show up to vigils long after the cameras are gone. Anna’s lifelong vigil continues in every woman who keeps the light burning in the cold, praying not just with words but with presence.

And Hagar’s desert cry is heard every time a woman discarded by the system insists, God sees me. When the world labels her disposable, she names herself worthy of survival.

Waiting does not mean weak. Waiting means enduring what should have broken us. It means staying alive long enough to imagine something better - and then helping build it for the people coming after us.

There is an Advent happening behind bars every single day. Letters move slowly across state lines. Commissary deposits are scraped together dollar by dollar. Children count days on calendars. Women whisper comfort to each other through vents, across bunks, through mail slots, through handwritten notes folded small enough to pass inspection.

And every one of these acts is a sermon.

They all preach the same truth Mary sang: the lowly are still being lifted. The hungry are still being filled. The world has not changed nearly enough - but neither have the women who keep it alive.

This season asks us to remember where salvation actually comes from. Not from palaces or policy announcements. Not from rescue narratives or charity galas. Salvation arrives from the margins.

From a teenage mother giving birth in a barn. From a runaway woman finding a well in the desert. From a widow who refuses to stop watching. From a jail cell, a halfway house, a hotline answered at midnight.

The women who wait are not standing still. They are holding the line. They are keeping hope alive in places the world has written off.

Advent is not just something we are waiting for. It is already here - in us, between us, carried forward by women who refuse to disappear.

✍️ This post closes SWOP Behind Bars’ December series, “Women Who Waited – Advent from the Margins,” reimagining sacred waiting as endurance, survival, and resistance. Join us in honoring women who still wait - for justice, for freedom, and for a world that finally sees them.