What are you waiting for?

Devotion for Being Apart -
July 24

This summer, I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

As a pastor, I have the distinct and unique benefit of also being the proofreader and theological sounding board to a prolific theologian. The section of Andy's latest manuscript that we worked through today talked about waiting. I wrote about waiting in a devotion back in May.  It’s July, and we are still waiting.

Waiting, Andy discussed, is always waiting for something. There is no waiting that isn't directed at some end.  We wait for a bus, or for our food at a restaurant, or wait for an answer to our college application, job interview, or offer on a house.

Because waiting is for something, imagining being stuck waiting, with no end or goal, feels awful.  He uses the example of prison - where the only thing someone is waiting for is for the waiting to be over. 

Right now, as a whole country, we don’t have a for to be waiting for. Are we waiting the pandemic to “end”? (What would that even look like?) A vaccine to be found? (distributed widely?) School to start? (meaning what??) The economy to recover? (??)  Life to get back to “normal”-? We don’t know what the end of our waiting will look like, or when it might come.  We are pandemic prisoners, waiting for our waiting to be over.

And yet, as I said in May, the church's job is to wait. We're called to this.  And we do know what we’re waiting for.   Christian waiting is shaped by the recognition that at any moment God might break in and meet us right here.  We wait for encounter with God. We wait for the justice God is bringing, and the peace God is bringing, and we wait actively, by living those realities now, even as they are not yet fully here.  We sit in the places of suffering and despair, of injustice or emptiness, and we wait for God together, alongside each other. With the world. For the world. Our waiting is active, hopeful. We know God is coming, is always coming into our death experiences with resurrection and new life. We don’t know when or how God might come, might bring redemption in small or big ways to the situations in which we wait. But that is part of the wait too. We watch, we trust, we hope, we wait.

Sabbath prepares us for this. By regularly putting down our doing and purposely spending time in being we are cultivating our waiting. Sabbath is meant to help us step out of the way of fear long enough to recognize its emptiness and inability to fulfill us.  It’s meant to shift us back into a way of life that waits expectantly every day, every moment, for God to show up and do something.

Normally, we are always filling up our life with busyness, so we don't have to be still, and uncomfortable. Busyness buffers us from waiting and wonder what we’re waiting for, or whether what we’re waiting for is worth the wait.  Modern people have mistaken fullness for busyness, so we get busier and busier, and make our lives fuller and fuller, which only makes them feel more and more empty. Normally, we’re too busy to really be in our lives. We're so busy doing, we forget our being and our belonging.

Now we are not in our lives, as they were. But we are in a season of waiting. 

It may be helpful in this season, to reflect on what we are actually waiting for, and what we hope will come.  Perhaps we may need to face that what we're waiting for either won't arrive or won't satisfy us when it does.

Are we waiting to return to a way of life that kept us from living a full life because we packed it too full?

We are made for fullness of life, to live in our belonging, connected to God and each other. We pause and rest regularly in order to remember that and return to it, and hopefully take that awareness into the rest of our week, so that it might shape our lives.

Now we are paused indefinitely, and we are waiting.

But can we let this pause help us remember and return to our true belonging and life meaning? Can we live in the Christian waiting we are called too?  Can we wait trusting that God comes in, that God is already here, and that our lives, our world, our nation, our communities, can be and are the place God is bringing salvation, in small and big ways, even every day?  Can we watch in the despair and pain, in the suffering and the anxiety, for the activity of God?

 This pandemic wait is longer than anyone thought it would be, and it's going to go on a whole lot longer.  Waiting only for the waiting to end is torture.

But this Christian waiting lasts a lifetime.  And waiting for the inbreaking of God is active, and hopeful, and joins in the transformation the Spirit is always bringing into the world.

These words of T.S. Elliott, from Four Quartets, speak to me today:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

For more:

Here is May’s post about waiting.

Here is a podcast Andy did about these themes.

And here is a reflection on sabbath lessons for this pandemic time.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:


God, the waiting is so hard.
What am I waiting for, really?
I think I am waiting for...
because I am telling myself...


God help me wait for you.
Help me watch for you.
Help me sense your presence.
Help me follow your guidance.
Help me join in your Kingdom,
breaking in now,
all around me,
moving the whole story,
toward life and fullness.
Teach me to wait.
Make me someone who waits,
hopeful and brave.
Amen.