The waiting is the hardest partEvery day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
From The Waiting by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Waiting sucks.
You know what I’m talking about. You pace around the bus stop wondering why the Circulator hasn’t pulled up like it was supposed to five minutes ago. You fiddle on your phone in an examination room, each breath growing heavier and heavier with impatience as you wait for the doctor to show up. You refresh your browser screen every thirty seconds wondering when that email will finally dance across your desktop. If waiting is a part of human existence, this is the part with which we struggle the most.
Jesus certainly did.
In Mark 9:19, Jesus walks in on a verbal skirmish occurring between his disciples and a man in the crowd. Jesus asks the equivalent of a 1st century, “What the hell is going on here?” and learns that the man has brought his son to be healed of an evil spirit but that the disciples have thus far been unable to offer any relief. Jesus, impatient with the lack of faith displayed by his followers, says, ““You unbelieving generation. How long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me.”
Don’t ever tell me that divinity doesn’t have an edge to it.
In this season of Advent, we are invited to practice something that apparently even Jesus struggled with- waiting. Fortunately, we do have an example of someone who exemplified what it meant to wait with as much grace and elegance as any person could muster.
Her name is Mary and there’s something about her (I recognize that some of you are not old enough to get that reference and this breaks my heart).
Mary is the first Christian- the inaugural carrier of the Word and the faithful witness who fearlessly tells the story of God with ever inch of her existence. When visited by the angel Gabriel in Luke 1 and told that she will give birth to Jesus, Mary responds by saying, “I am the Lord’s servant. Be it unto me as you have said.” Mary does not flinch in the face of performing faithful discipleship. Rather, she demonstrates for us what it means to wait not just on the Lord, but also on our own selves.
Think back to when you were a teenager and the dreams you had then. Do you remember the places you wanted to visit? Can you recall where you wanted to live or which career you wanted to pursue? I’m sure that Mary had dreams; perhaps they were about starting a family and building a fulfilling life with Joseph. But whatever dreams filled Mary’s mind, certainly none of them included an unplanned pregnancy and becoming the headline of Galilee’s gossip columns. And yet, for reasons we are not able to fully understand, Mary puts her own hopes on hold and instead takes up the hope of God for her story. She walks out into the waiting room of her life and tells her 5-year plan to check out the magazine selection because it’s probably going to be a while.
As followers of Jesus, we’re in the unique predicament of being invited to take our cues from Mary and enter into this season of Advent with a willingness to have our lives interrupted by God’s hopes and dreams for us both individually and as a community. An old Yiddish proverb says, “We make plans and God laughs.” But perhaps it is not that God laughs but rather that God looks at what we’ve sketched on our life’s canvas and says, “Are you satisfied with those shades and hues?” Then, like a kind mother expanding her child’s imagination, God reaches into a box of crayons and starts to pull out new and captivating colors that utterly transform our understanding of beauty and brilliance.
In her novel Saint Maybe, Anne Tyler tells the story of a young man named Ian Bedloe who assumes responsibility for raising his deceased brother’s three children. This decision means that Ian must drop out of college and take a job in order to support the children and be free to spend more time with them. Ian’s mother is flabbergasted at her son’s ostensibly reckless behavior and becomes even more confounded when she learns that Ian’s decision springs from convictions gleaned from a new church he has started to attend. Ian’s mother attempts to counter her son’s choice by saying, “Of course we have nothing against religion; we raised all of you children to be Christians. But our church never asked us to abandon our entire way of life.” Ian spares no time before responding, “Well, maybe it should have.”
We want to be a community where we welcome folks to drop what they’re doing and answer the call of Jesus for their lives. We want to be a people who stop haggling with God for things we don’t even want rather than welcoming the things of God into our lives that we really need. We want to learn how God’s desires are disguised as our deepest desires if only we could name them properly. We want to be like Mary and declare ourselves to be the Lord’s servants, acting as agents of God’s peace and justice wherever we go.
Like Mary the mother of God (and Tom Petty!), we take it on faith and we take it to the heart.
Thanks be to God, even when the waiting is the hardest part.
