Acting in the Waiting

I'm halfway through the book Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. It's the story of a mountain climber who, after a failed attempt to climb K2 in Pakistan, was so moved by the hospitality of the Pakistan villagers that he vowed to return and build a school there. What strikes me about this story, as it relates to Advent, is that Mortenson didn't wait for Pakistan to be considered safe or stable, or even to know where he might get his supplies or exactly where he'd build his school. At the same time, he did have to practice waiting - for many hours at a checkpoint, or for days while locals argued about where he should build his school. But he didn't wait until all was calm and settled before he acted. The children of Pakistan needed a school, and he was going to move metaphorical mountains to make that happen. There was an urgency to his waiting.

I want to write this example off as something only an extreme mountain-climber would have the crazy courage to do. But I have to ask myself: Is there enough urgency in my waiting? I'm waiting for peace and an end to poverty in the world. But God knows I'm not waiting for those as urgently as those who are hungry or whose lives are torn apart by war. I'm waiting for clarity in what might be next vocationally, but should this waiting have more urgency? One tension for me is that I usually define "waiting" as setting aside all of the shoulds/musts/have to's in order to settle in and try to hear God's whispers. But I'm honestly terrible at that. So how do I listen for God's sense of urgency and turn down the volume on the world's definition of urgency?