Waiting For It . . .

I first heard the phrase “slower than Christmas” when we moved back to Texas.  I was 9- years-old at the time.

We had lived in Texas when I was an infant, but that scarcely counts! And, in any case, waiting for Christmas at 9 years of age is a given.  I knew kids who started their Christmas wish lists in January, revising as the year progressed. When you are young, immediacy is the default for desires, and waiting is the blight of every hope.

It Gets Easier

As we get older, waiting can get easier—in some areas, at least. I know very few adults who begin their Christmas wish list before Thanksgiving; fewer still who cannot wait for their birthday in order to get a present. (As we all know too well, the gift of another year to someone’s total begins to outweigh the appeal of trinkets and toys after a certain tally has been reached.)

There are dozens of scripture verses involving waiting – the Psalms seem particularly rich in this. Looking at different translations, I discovered that what some translators construe as “wait” others translate as hope. For instance in the old King James version, Isaiah 40:31 is translated as:

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Whereas in the U. S. Conference of Bishops online Bible  the same passage is translated:

They that hope in the LORD will renew their strength, they will soar on eagles’ wings; They will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint.

The point is that waiting, for a mature Christian, is not a same as the undisciplined impatience of a child waiting for Christmas celebrations. When we wait as Christians and Catholics we wait with hope, in faith, putting our trust in God our Father to bring us to his desired ends which by definition are best for us.

The Situations Change

The situations that require waiting seem to grow and multiply as we age, and often gain in how important they seem. Youthful issues such as waiting to drive, getting our first job, and striking out as independent adults eventually give way to other concerns.

As adults we wait for uncomfortable situations in the workplace or the community to resolve, unhappily not always in our favor. We work and wait for promotions, raises, opportunities, and all sorts of things.

Sometimes our waits are relatively trivial. We wait in traffic or in line at a store. We wait for the event ticket booth to open, then later for the event to start.

Sometimes our waiting is important beyond expression. We wait for the results of a medical test. We wait for labor to end and a birth to be announced. And we wait for a loved one to return from war and our waiting then is filled with dreadful hope – that we are not met with a somber telegram telling us that the return will be marked with mourning rather than rejoicing.

I would like to think that waiting gets easier or at least that we get better at it as we age. However, it seems to me that the areas in which waiting is hard do change and they evolve along with our lives. We get better at managing the impatience, frustration, and anxiety of waiting, but if something is important enough to us to be conscious of waiting for it, we still find waiting difficult.

High Stakes Waiting

The hardest waiting, of course, is the waiting we do when the stakes are grave and high. Sitting in a literal waiting room while a loved one is in surgery, for instance, is among the most difficult waiting there is.

The thing to remember is that we never wait alone. We are “surrounded by a cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). We can lean on the examples of our brothers and sisters, and especially our predecessors in the faith.

As the Jews awaited the Messiah (and still do!) we await His return. Compared to the duration of that wait, an hour or two in a waiting room, or a day or a week or even a month pales in comparison.

Of course this is the sort of glib observation that is easy to make and difficult to live out in reality. All we can do is to practice, and more than that, to prepare ourselves by making prayer something we do more frequently than as a last resort.

Some years ago, when I first read “The Way of a Pilgrim” and began using The Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me), I started attempting to fall into it any time I was in a situation of essentially unproductive waiting. Sitting in a car waiting for a traffic light to change is a prime example. The idea the prayer might become something automatic, even autonomic, caught my fancy.

In those days I was a freelance writer supplementing income with gig type jobs (long before “gig economy” became a phrase).  Later on I became a parent and dove into a full-time career. Waiting at a traffic light suddenly became filled with keeping eyes and ears on my daughter rather than more meditative pursuits.

Filling the Time

Now my daughter is long since well launched, and life is filled with waiting opportunities (more than a few of them involving actual “waiting rooms).  Filling those minutes by carrying a book or with prayer is a rewarding way of making waiting more than an exercise in patience.

In 1958, the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a sardonic, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant poem called I Am Waiting.  Ignoring for the moment his trendy sarcasm and cynicism, it does capture the spirit of waiting. For as I sit and wait, whether on a bus bench or in a doctor’s office, I too am awaiting “the day that maketh all things clear”. . . and new again.