I’m writing at A Deeper Story today, talking about waiting – and why it’s important. But also why it’s dang hard. You can start here and then click over to read the rest . . .
The house is quiet tonight. And that feels right. I am tired and more than a little bit anxious, wondering if a long-planned vacation is going to happen. Inclement weather may well force cancellation of our flight and we truly need a break about now. A break in the weather, a break from the routines of surgical recovery, a break.
So, we wait. We wait for weather updates, we wait to hear from the airline, we wait to decide if we should re-schedule.*
We wait.
And as we wait, I’m reflecting on how much of life is spent doing exactly that — waiting. Waiting for all kinds of things, from the trivial to the sublime. We wait in traffic, we wait for school to be out, we wait for the bread to rise, we wait for the doctor to call, we wait for a baby to be born or an elderly, ailing loved one to die. We live in the middle of all kinds of waiting — small kinds of waiting and terribly L O N G ones, too.
We wait.
And I guess we’re in pretty good company with all this waiting — at least, if we take our Holy Book (even a little bit) seriously. EVERYBODY waits in the pages of our book, some of them a dang long time, seems to me.
And so much of the time, that waiting is marked by hope. Perhaps God begins it all when he waits for Adam and Eve to show up for their usual evening stroll, patiently calling them to come out from hiding. I wonder, do you think God hopes? One of the things that I love about our creation story is this picture of God looking for his loved creatures. I know nothing about the workings of time and eternity, but it somehow makes me happy to think that God always hopes good things for us, that God imagines a different ending, one of reunion and reconnection.
Surely the characters whose lives mark the pages of Our Book are regularly on the look-out for a different ending. Noah waits for it to rain — and then for it to stop raining. Abraham waits for lots of things — a word from the One God, and for a final landing place, one marked with beauty and abundance. But most of all, Abraham and Sarah wait for an heir, an answer to a promise. They wait beyond hope, those two. . .
Just click on this line and you can finish this piece over at A Deeper Story. . .
