Marilu Thomas, “The Waiting Room”
I am at the age when I have a calendar full of medical appointments. I remember thinking my own parents had turned neurotic when they started the medical-merry-go- round that defines modern older age. On Friday, I was in three different waiting rooms. It’s interesting being in a space that tells you what you should do—wait. Not the “about to see the doctor” room or the “opportunity” room. Everyone, including me, showed their disdain for waiting by reading something very important on their phone, because we had no power to make the waiting stop.
Think about your most annoying waiting spots.
Waiting at the DMV
Waiting to pay for something
Waiting for a spouse to be ready to go
Waiting for a spouse to do that thing that you have been asking about forever
Waiting for children to stop bickering
Waiting for a thank you that never comes
Waiting on a job, promotion or new direction
Waiting for your future to begin
Waiting for your grades
Waiting for a diagnosis or a cure
Waiting for morning when you can’t sleep
Waiting for love
Waiting for a miracle
Waiting for God to do something
I’m sure you can add to this list. Everyone takes their turn in the waiting room.
There is vulnerability in waiting and so it is a favorite subject of novelists, directors, songwriters and dream makers. Jane Austen’s six novels are ripe with waiting and great mysteries use suspenseful waiting to hook us. Stephen Spielberg’s classic film, The Terminal, has Tom Hanks waiting at JFK Gate 67 until his country overcomes a political coup. The late great Tom Petty accurately sung, “The waiting is the hardest part.” Mick Jagger wrote, “Waiting on a Friend” about waiting on saxophone player Sonny Rollins to finally agree to play with the Rolling Stones. John Mayer’s, “Waiting on the World to Change,” was an anthem to the powerlessness of a generation. In sports, Argentine soccer player Lionel Messi’s story of waiting for treatment for his Childhood Growth deficiency is poignant—and may have another big payoff today.
To wait is defined as “to stay in place or remain inactive in expectation of an event, someone’s arrival or a specific turn.” As a verb, it means delaying action. Basically, don’t just do something, sit there. No wonder we don’t like waiting. We’re movers and shakers. Waiting feels like wasted time.
Our Romans text today tells us we are waiting like children wait. We like to think of this type of waiting as open and trusting, but impatience is a hallmark of childhood. If you’ve taken your kids on a vacation, you’re well aware of the “Are we there yet?” question that starts pretty much when you leave home. Children find waiting painful because they are not driving the car or plane, or plannings the vacations. And they can’t delay gratification. The truth is, we very much wait like children where God is concerned. We can’t see what’s going on from God’s point of view, so we feel vulnerable and scared. But the text also says we “groan inwardly” as children awaiting adoption, with a yearning for belonging and a family identity. Have you felt this deep orphan need to be known and not feel alone? The waiting for life to ‘feel’ right? The fear of being rejected or abandoned? The longing to know the newness of a new life?
C.S. Lewis lends some insight into this Christian idea of adoption, or newness of life, promised us in Christ. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote: “God became man to turn creatures into sons; not simply to produce better men of the old kind, but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better, but like turning a horse into a winged creature. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.” (183) In other words, most of who I tell you I am is a gossamer weaving of achievements, titles and connections that are a coat of armor for the me is underneath my personality. When I turn to Christ, I have the life I was created for, not the one I have woven for myself.
St. Paul tells us in Romans that “creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it.” In other words, our thoughts and actions are futile because God has willed it that way. God has made the world in such a way that we are blind to what we are actually waiting for, making our will ineffective because we don’t know what we are facing. Like children asking, “Are we there yet?,” we can’t see the road ahead of us. God in God’s mercy saves us from ourselves by making our will seem powerful, but spiritually inert. We need a power outside of ourselves to end our waiting.
Like all of us, I am waiting for various things in my life. Some are anticipatory, like our family beach vacation next week. Some are painful, like my husband Stuart being in hospice for a year now. In my waiting, I can start to think that God is not able to help me, that God is disinterested in my suffering or need. What is God’s problem? What is happening?
Douglas John Hall, in his book God & Human Suffering, explains, “God’s problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God’s problem is that God loves! Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life. Without love, …God could behave towards the world in the way …many people think is desirable –punishing the evil-doers and rewarding the good. But like as a Father who pities his children, the biblical God is prevented from such direct action because of a love which is ready to suffer with and for the beloved before it will give way to strict justice…It means that God’s power has ultimately to articulate itself in divine solidarity with the sufferer, that is, in the “weakness” of suffering love.” (156)
This has been helpful to me to know that understanding why things happen in God’s world is above my paygrade, but that God’s love is with me in my suffering. To be Christian is to trust that Christ is God in solidarity with the sufferer. For instance, God has a date for Stuart’s passing, but I don’t need to know when it is because I trust God does. God waits with me as the time becomes right and full.
Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, in her book Prayer in the Night, clarifies our situation as Christians. “Our posture of waiting does not deny the horrors of the night, but it bets on the morning to come. Jesus’s resurrection is the sole evidence that love triumphs over death, that beauty outlives horror, that the meek will inherit the earth, that those who mourn will be comforted. The reason I can continue watching and waiting, even as the world is shrouded in darkness, is because the things I long for are not rooted in wishful thinking or religious ritual but are solid as a stone rolled away.” (57)
The way of the Cross is the way of waiting for all things to be set right, especially us. Like John Mayer, you can wait for the world to change, but it will be a very long wait. Or you can wait on the Lord, who makes heaven and earth. God is not powerless to change the world. God changes the world through love. John Douglas Hall wrote that “God’s power expresses itself unexpectedly in the weakness of love…For every one of us know, if we’ve lived and loved at all, something of the meaning of that yearning, that weak power, that powerful weakness.” (158)
Our beloved priest Robert Capon shared this understanding when he wrote, “The awfulness of saving grace is the dreadfulness of a love that will not take us out of our troubles, but instead insists on saving us in and through them.” God lives anonymously in the waiting room with us, loving us where we sit. Not asking for us to do one thing to be loved and comforted in our waiting.
The last paragraph of C.S. Lewis’s book is powerful and on topic today. He talks about how somehow in our waiting we are holding back ourselves, waiting for our own ambitions and wishes to come true. But it is futile because we are hoping for something that is not real, based only on self-will, which is the ultimate insecurity. He wrote, “The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him and with Him everything else thrown in.” (190)
Welcome to the waiting room. God will see you now.
Amen.
