Wait

Wait

Psalm 46

“Go to Jerusalem and wait.”  That’s where we left the disciples.  Jesus is gone.  His words are still ringing in their ears.  The disciples will be “clothed in power from on high.” In the meantime, they need to wait…

Now, I’ve mentioned before that had Christianity been designed by a marketing expert (and not the expert who designed the universe), things would be different.  Marketable faith would be grounded in what we are already predisposed to do:  look out for ourselves, make wealth and happiness our top concerns; call on us to love the people we already like; unite us by fighting a common enemy; and give us permission to relish a good grudge. Seriously, if you just wanted to fill the seats, you know…if you had no soul…this would be a hit!

Instead, we have this faith that puts us at odds with ourselves.  It is not our nature to defer our own self interests.  We can do so for a little while, when we are at our best but, if we listen to the wisdom of our A.A. friends, all we have to be is hungry, angry, lonely, or tired and we will “relapse,” into being less than our better selves.  (H.A.L.T. is the handy mnemonic device for that thought!)  To love God and love our neighbors (yes, even that neighbor) with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, to forgive, to be humble, to defer our desires—these are enormous challenges.  Stop for a moment and consider who else we’re supposed to love—ourselves!  If we’re not some undying narcissist, that might be the hardest task of all.  Even if we do the work and get this right every now and then, we don’t necessarily see the return.  Maybe I tried to help but my help wasn’t that well received.  Maybe I didn’t feel quite as “warm and fuzzy” as I thought I would.

Of all the difficult things that God asks us to do, one of the hardest is to wait.  Think of how many famously faithful people are asked to wait.  Abraham was promised a child and then waited for 25 years until that child, Isaac, was born.  Moses and our ancestors were promised a land of milk and honey. Then God took them the long way through the wilderness for the next forty years.  God promised David that he would be king.  David then spent years being chased by King Saul before God’s promise was fulfilled.  People were waiting for a Messiah for hundreds of years.  Even after Jesus was born, even after all the promises that surrounded his birth, his ministry did not start for another thirty years.

Given all of these examples, the shocking thing is that we are shocked at all when it is our turn to wait.  It dawns on us that we may just be waiting a while.  Then, we get that look of righteous indignation on our faces and square off with God:  “Me…wait?  You’ve got to be kidding!  Who came up with that plan?  Oh…shoot…it was you?” Again, if faith was an easy sell, no one would ever have to wait. Of course, nothing in the Bible actually supports these expectations.  However, when has a lack of evidence ever kept us from reaching our own conclusions, right?

Let’s be honest…human beings hate to wait.  Do you remember dial up internet?  Do you remember “snail mail”—you know, the piece of paper and envelope and a stamp thing?  Do you remember when the only time you got to see your favorite movie was when the network decided to show your your favorite movie and the only time you got to see the next episode of your favorite show was next week—same time, same channel.  We live in an on demand world and we take it personally when our demands are not met.  We not only want our deliveries fast, we want them free, too! Watch people fidget in their cars as they wait for the light to change.  Or, take a serious look at how few drivers actually come to a stop at a stop sign.  “Stopping would take me a full second.” 

Honestly, I’d rather sell love or self-sacrifice as faith values any day over the challenge of selling waiting to a “hurry it up” world.  Love and self-sacrifice are things that we can sit with for a while and explore a bit as we grow.  Waiting is such an everyday, built in human experience and we’ve hated it pretty much since the day we were born.  How many of you who have been parents were blessed with the two year old who looked you in the eye and said, “That’s okay if I can’t have the candy right now.  I’ll just wait.”  None of us!  And while we battled their impulses and desires and tried to help them harness that energy, it turns out we were fighting our own battles at the same time, battles that to us were just so much more important than candy, because the sources of our impatience are always so much more grown up…right?

So, how do we market the value of waiting.  Let me build the case.  Let’s start this way.  The worst thing that could have happened to you as a child would be to have parents who met your every need as soon as you expressed that need or maybe before you ever knew you had a need at all.  Sounds like a dream but as with so many things that sound like a dream, it would be a nightmare.  It would be a nightmare for everyone else in your life.  Why?  Imagine the expectations you would carry with you into every other relationship in your life. What you would have learned is that if someone really cares about you then they, like your parents, will meet your every need. No one…not a soul…can do that.  Because you were adored too much early on, everyone else who tried to love you would fail—in your eyes.  You will be a miserable human being who freely shares that misery with others.

The earliest experiences of waiting in our lives are as children and involve basic needs:  I’m hungry; I’m angry; I’m lonely; I’m tired.  (Oops!  There’s that mnemonic again, H.A.L.T.  It turns out that’s been in play our whole lives!)  If we’re really lucky, we have people who love us enough not to meet our every need but to work with us to figure out what people actually do with unmet needs.  There may be a difference between being angry that I’m being served broccoli for dinner and declaring that only horrible people would serve broccoli!  It is not a stretch to say that learning what to do with my needs and learning to defer those needs and just wait, is the beginning of my real development of an internal life. This would be the kind of an internal life that might allow me one day to be able to feel two conflicting things at the same time:  “I am so disappointed in what I’m being served for dinner but the fact that this person is giving me food at all might just be evidence of their love.”  To begin to be able to tolerate such internal conflicts might just be a landmark on the way to becoming a full-fledged human being!

We know this to be true in our interpersonal experience as human beings.  There really is an optimal level of frustration for human growth. The great human stories are almost always about people who overcame the odds that were stacked against them at birth or who took on a challenge of daunting proportions.  Things weren’t easy but they were brave and persistent and resilient.  And everything that they learned from each of those setbacks and challenges became an essential skill or a defining moment that they used to face what was next.  This is how we grow.

I think the same is true for us spiritually.  Abraham wouldn’t be the father of faith if he hadn’t waited so long to be a father and known the struggle to still believe.  The David who boldly faced down Goliath would later become the young adult who decided not to kill King Saul two different times, even knowing that Saul would have killed him in an instant.  Think about Joseph, the overly adored son of Jacob who was despised by his brothers and sold into slavery.    While a slave, he was falsely accused and convicted of a crime.  He spent thirteen years in prison.  Let me repeat that…he spent thirteen years in prison.  And what did he become? First, he became the duly appointed prisoner in charge of caring for other prisoner’s needs.  (Who wouldn’t want that job?)  In the course of doing that, he started interpreting dreams.  Eventually, he interpreted the dreams of the most powerful man in the world, who eventually made Joseph the second most powerful man.  And without any of those moments along the way, Joseph would have never become Joseph.

For better or worse, what we go through is a huge part of how we become who we are.  Maybe it would make sense to spend less time deciding which experiences were better and which experiences were worse.  Maybe the first invitation of waiting is to accept what’s going on and ask a far more interesting question:  “Where is God in this experience?”  Nothing can separate us from the love of God.  Therefore, the question in any moment while we wait is, “Who is God calling me to be, now?  What would it mean to be a loving person, now?”

At the least, what I gain in learning how to wait is perspective which is really a pretty big deal.  The value of what I’m going through doesn’t boil down to how I am feeling.  The value of what I’m going through isn’t just about arriving at some future destination when the waiting is over.  While I am waiting, there is work that I can do.  I can connect to this person whom I would have otherwise missed altogether because perspective allows me to see that they are in fact a full-fledged human being, too.  Can I make them smile?  Can I invite them to connect? While I am waiting, there are stories that I can remember—stories of my ancestors in faith who also struggled through hard things like waiting.  Maybe there is wisdom they can share with me.  While I am waiting, (you knew this was coming) maybe I could even explore what it would sound like if I opened a conversation of my own with God—a conversation so honest that it would happen in my own words and not sound at all like I used to think a prayer was supposed to sound.

The point of the waiting might be simply to learn to be still—to just be, even in a world that wants so badly to know what we are doing.  That might be a pretty radical step.  Or the point of the waiting might be to take a second or third or 15th look at things until I see something new and fresh and wonderful.  Or, the point of the waiting might be to take a breath and stop forcing things as if we are God.  We’ve all stripped the head right off a screw by not using the right sized screwdriver, right.  Then, we blame the screwdriver.  Then, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we learn how much time we could have saved if we had just been able to wait until we had the right screwdriver in our hands after all.

A pastor I read this week put the point beautifully:  “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”  It’s hard to know what you can do if you can only see one possibility—the one you would for sure make happen if only you were God.  It’s hard to know what you have if you’ve lost all sense of your internal life.  It’s not hard to lose total track of where you are if you are completely lost in your frustrations.  To do what you can, with what you have, where you are, you have to learn how to be still and wait.  You have to accept that God is God and you are not.  You have to learn how to listen to your life and to the persistent whisper of our loving God.   Imagine if we could see life’s next frustration coming and actually say to ourselves, “That’s okay.  I’ve learned how to wait.  In the meantime, I know that God’s in here somewhere…”