Sunday Advent Reflection: Wait for the Lord

One true thing that I have sometimes heard about motherhood, especially the mothering of very young children, is that the days are over long but the years are too short. Each day can stretch itself out in an endless string of troubled minutes, the tasks, the tiredness, the vexations spread out before you so that you fear that you won’t make it. There isn’t enough sleep and the revolving circle of hunger and discipline and dirt make each day it’s own eternity. But then you turn around and suddenly the child is ten years old, and then twenty, and you cannot account for the passing of time. Each single day was so long, you thought you weren’t going to get through each one. You couldn’t wait, in the midst of them, for some relief, for something to change or shift, for help to come.

This sense of the anxiety of time, of time being too slow to bear, of the work being too great to handle, isn’t only the property of motherhood, it is an essentially Chrisitan experience. If you are fixed in time, trying to keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, you are often going to find yourself bearing the time in anxiety and discomfort. The days are going to be too long. You’re going to want to do more work than is reasonable, you are going to be frustrated over your own sin, you’re going to be discouraged and heartbroken over people who are ill, or spiritually corrupt, or going in a terrible direction, or whose unkindness you are called to absorb without murmur. Many many days will seem intolerably long. You will cry out over and over again for relief, for something to shift or change, for God to do something to make things better.

From our perspective, waiting is one of the most difficult trials we bear, enduring in the middle of anxious toil, wanting God to do something, and then going on into the next hour finding that he didn’t provide the relief you thought you needed, but rather you got through it even though you didn’t expect to. You wait and endure, and sorrow over it all.

But from God’s perspective, waiting with endurance is an essential property of his own goodness. This clicked into place for me yesterday as I was struggling through Walmart, trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a feast, when there doesn’t seem a lot to rejoice over on the horizon. Great and small troubles crowd together, especially when you are trying to negotiate your overly large cart down the candy aisle the weekend before Christmas. I stood in front of the gum and prayed for God to judge the world. ‘Oh God,’ I cried out in my spirit, though not with my lips, my head bowed, my thumb scrolling through the list on my phone, “Oh God, please come back right now. Please put a stop to all our madness and sin. Please let not another wrong go on.” And then I lifted my eyes from my phone and nothing happened. The gum was still there and someone bashed into me accidentally, trying to get to the gross sugary bags of chocolate.

I struggled out of the store with my many burdens, through the snow, trying to remember where my car was, and trying to be grateful for the car and for the gum and for everything. “We just wait and wait and nothing happens,” I muttered. And my mind turned to Lazarus. Not the the friend of Jesus, but the poor man by the gate, who spent his whole life covered in sores, begging, and at his death was caught up into the bosom of Abraham, what we like to call heaven, the place of consolation, but also, most remarkably, a place of further waiting. Lazarus is still there, in the bosom of Abraham, comforted, waiting for the next part, for the trumpet, for The Day of the Lord.

Some of us chafe against the slowness, the over abundant patience of God who could redress all the ills of his creation, but who waits and waits and waits, and lets us wait.

And I was thus reminded that the waiting for God that the Cristian endures is not an unkindness, but rather a matter of trust. God doesn’t make us wait, he hasn’t not come back because he is unkind, because he forgot or has better things to do. He waits so that we will learn to trust him. All the long days of this life are a matter of trust, of letting God be God.

We mess this up a lot by rushing in to fix the trouble, or relieve the anxiety by grasping at stuff to make it better. Like Eve, untrusting, sure God is withholding something essential, we sin, we grab. Like Uzziah, at the height of his power, sauntering into the temple to grab the censor and swing the incense, we think we are owed something, and so we rush in to do what we think God should have done. Our work isn’t measured against his patience.

The ability to patiently endure, to suffer through the day without grabbing and sinning, should, therefore, be a point of encouragement. Each moment that you let go by, trusting that God waits out of love and not neglect, each work that you do without acclaim and notice, each prayer that you pray, all of that is woven together with your ultimate consolation.

It’s the last Sunday of Advent, a good moment to lift up our eyes. The hope of the world, our own consolation came, not to judge, not to destroy, but to endure with us, to rescue us from the grasping power of sin, to trust the Father perfectly when we had stumbled and fallen. Wait for the Lord. His day is near, near enough for us to endure with trust, and yea, even hope.