Waiting

Waiting. It’s killer, isn’t it? I find myself doing a lot of waiting these days, from the sublime to the ridiculous: waiting for new life, waiting for my nails to dry, waiting for traffic, waiting for hopes to be  fulfilled that always seem to be pushed a little further away, waiting to find out what ministry God has in store for us in this next year and beyond. And tonight specifically, waiting for a plane to take me to the sunshine, with a little boy who was too ill to catch the one his dad and brother caught this morning.

It seems so frustrating, doesn’t it, such a waste of time.  If I knew, if I were already there, if I could just get going, if I didn’t have to stop here et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then I would be able to get on with life, grab it with both hands, get past the angst and turmoil and make it all happen. Sometimes we want to get out of the waiting so bad we’ll even travel in the wrong direction just to be moving! Craziness.

So I’ve started to wonder what God might want to be doing in all this apparently wasted time.

Through Advent (my thoughts have taken a little while to gather together because my waiting is also in the middle of the busy, isn’t that so often the way?) I’ve been thinking of how it must have been for Mary. Pregnant with anticipation. Waiting. Wondering. Trusting that what the angel said was true, but still not quite able to see it in her mind’s eye. This is my third baby, and by no means an immaculate conception, but every time, I still find it hard to believe that no one asks for proof when I go to the Doctor to register a pregnancy. I’ve seen those blue lines, I’ve thrown up, but it’s not until I hear the heartbeat, see the blurry outline in the scan, that I realise how my heart was in my mouth with fear that I’d made it all up. For Mary, with no scan, no one to listen for a heartbeat, waiting for the quickening, the first kicks and wriggles, how much more unbelievable! The waiting must have been torturous. And yet, what hope she had. Utter conviction that this baby was going to upright wrongs, bring justice to the oppressed and truly change the world. I loved reading this insight into the Magnificat.

Such courage and boldness to believe this little baked bean inside of her was really and truly who He said he was going to be.

In my wondering and frustration with waiting I stumbled across these clarifying words from Ruth Hayley Barton:

‘One of the reasons God doesn’t always answer us immediately is that waiting is God’s crucible of transformation. Waiting is how God gets at the idols of our heart. Waiting addresses the things we thing we need beside God to be content: money, comfort, expedience, success or control. It creates space to learn more about who God is, to receive his purposes into our lives, to move past our resistance and say our deepest yes to him.

The season of Advent is full of people waiting everywhere. Elizabeth is waiting for a baby. Zechariah is waiting to speak. Simeon is waiting to see the salvation of Israel. Anna is waiting on God’s promise. Israel is waiting for God’s promised prophet. Mary is betrothed and waiting to get married.

Then, after years of waiting, in one breath-taking moment, an angel greets Mary, and says, ‘Greetings, you are highly favoured!’ And when Mary hears God’s plan for her, she responds to God’s invitation with, ‘I am the Lord’s servant, may your word to me be fulfilled.’ Her ‘yes’ brings God to us n person – in Jesus. All that waiting had a purpose!

In that moment, human ears hear what the human soul has been longing to hear throughout the ages. God has kept his promise. The woman and her offspring – young and innocent, without a scrap of earthly power- are here. Through them the forces of evil in our world will be defeated! They are our guarantee that waiting is worth the while. God hasn’t forgotten us. He is faithful. The Holy One comes through.’

Whew. As if that weren’t enough, I also can’t get this picture (by Sr. Grace Remington, OCSO, Copyright 2005, Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey) out of my mind. It perfectly captures that idea of Mary living to see the fulfillment of the promises of God. Look at their feet! Eve tied up in that serpent, Mary crushing its head. Mary watching Eve watching the baby. It tells a story of waiting, yes, but also, so much hope.

I’ve noticed this Advent how many times the angels approach the people they bring messages to with the exhortation, ‘do not be afraid!’ Maybe they’re pretty frightening, I guess they must be. But they always come to change the status quo, to shift their hearers out of their comfort zone into something usually crazy and unbelievable. But what I’ve started to notice is that the people who welcomed Jesus, who made room for him: Mary, the shepherds, they experience joy in place of fear. The people who saw the potential for chaos and disruption and chose to try and control it themselves, like Herod, saw their fear take on a life of its own and cause devastating destruction. It’s easy to notice that as a theological abstraction, quite fun to preach. But it’s extremely challenging to take my own situations of unknown, status quo shifting waiting and to make those places of welcome for Jesus, rather than places where fear runs riot.

I started 2017 with the word JOY as my ‘word for the year’, my word to explore and discover and experience. To be honest, I’m not sure I got it right. I think often this past year I’d hidden from the painful situations I’ve found myself in, rather than choosing to open up those dark and painful places to the inhabitation of Jesus. So, in these last few minutes of 2017, I’m choosing to allow the frustrating, boring, painful waiting places to become places of joy as I invite Jesus to make sense in it all.

Happy New Year.