Waiting

Growing up - I remember my father telling us that “patience was waiting with a smile.”

It was, I’m sure, meant to encourage impatient kiddos who wanted something quickly from parents who were raising six small children - something to ward off our whining and excessive requests for things that I’m sure felt vital to us, but less so in the larger scheme of parenting and managing our home.

Patient waiting. The irony being in the origin of the word patient - meaning ‘one who suffers’ - who bears and carries pain.

We all know waiting.

Waiting for healing, for word about an interview, a call from the hospital, forgiveness, election results, for morning, for sleep, for pain to stop, a heart to mend, a system to change…justice, equity, love, Christmas…

I find it complex to write about waiting. It feels cruel to suggest that waiting will be worth it or that we should smile or find something to occupy ourselves while we do so. Waiting for food, or a home, even companionship - there are some things that just should not require waiting.

Yet - waiting is real - it is part of our human existence.

Ultimately, there is no opting out of waiting. God is neither instantaneous nor inert.

What is waiting?

I used to feel like waiting was nothingness - as if I were spiraling outside of time.

I imagine that really awful waiting can make us feel as if it - we - were outside of God.

Waiting isn’t a dormant break in the creation story.

I don’t always understand how to be or feel or make sense of waiting time. I don’t know its purpose or reason,

I do believe - with all my heart - that even waiting is within the context of God.

I believe creation is always unfolding.

God doesn’t cease. Our waiting is not lost time beyond the reach of the Spirit.

In fact, where more significant is the Spirit’s presence, but in the places of suspension and biding?

In the brevity between one inhale and the next the entire world can shift, a child can be born.

These are the places I can feel my prayer being drawn - places where I do not sense movement but where my faith longs to believe even there - even here - the breath of God continues to stir.

If I am willing to keep watch - and to wait — then at any moment my vigilance can become witnessing.

Certainly, God’s emergence does not require my belief - yet - I wonder…

Why risk missing the glorious advent of whatever is coming next?

Maybe - if I am willing to be IN the waiting - to bear it alongside of others whose waiting seems unbearable - then perhaps I also make myself available. Open to receiving, midwifing, co-creating, co-laboring - -

available to playing a small part in the alchemy of Spirit incarnating in this world.

Let’s wait together. Biding time with one another. Bearing both hope and burden.

Abiding in God. Trusting God in us to dwell.