Long before the advent of the corona virus into our lives a few months ago, we found ourselves forever waiting. In the express lane of the grocery store or at long traffic lights. At the doctor’s office we learn the meaning of being a “patient”. We call the insurance company to ask a simple question, manage to work our way through the maze of call options with their series of numbers to punch only to receive a recording that “all of the available agents are busy with other customers…but don’t hang up because your call is important to us. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” And you waste yourself in all that time, simply waiting on what seems like a trivial pursuit.
There are other — deeper — forms of waiting. Your teenager is out for the evening and long overdue. You stand at the window, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of oncoming light, some indicator that a car has made it safely through your worst fears and is approaching your driveway. Or the lab tests take longer than expected, and your waiting becomes embedded with pins and needles. With the larger fear and threat of where or when this corona virus hanging over the world will strike, waiting undermines our living.
Faith is a form of the waiting game we have all learned to play. It’s the “assurance of things hoped for…” Things anticipated. It’s a conviction of the unseen, unknown future that something’s coming. Something good. Something new and better and lovelier. And our job is to hang around. To wait with the rest of creation that almost seems to be groaning like a mother in childbirth trying to deliver someone or something that will finally be redemptive.
Or as the psalmist put it, our souls wait for the Lord, more than the watchmen for the morning.
Or as the psalmist put it, our souls wait for the Lord, more than the watchmen for the morning.Frederick Ohler, in his book of prayer poems entitled Better than Nice and other Conventional Prayers, summarizes our feelings like this: “We wait like…a wife on a widow’s walk…a child on the day before Christmas…a father worrying at the window late at night….a mother ten months pregnant….like hostages….captives….Babylonian Jews. The more we know….the more we know we don’t know….and our overstanding gives way to….mystery….humility….anticipation….patience….and advent.”