These
words come from “Gospel” of Tom Petty: J
The waiting is the hardest part.
Every day you get one more yard.
You take it on faith; you take it to the
heart;
The waiting is the hardest part.
Tom
definitely wasn’t writing his songs for use in church—far from it. Nevertheless, sometimes their simple lyrics
“preach” to me.
Sometimes, “secular” music stumbles upon
Sacred truth.
Waiting can
indeed be hard. These days between Easter and Pentecost are a time of waiting
for the Church. We all celebrated the miracle of resurrection a few weeks ago
and the church was packed. But now, the
miracle has given way to the mundane—and we find it hard to sustain our
belief. We begin to question if it was
“really Jesus?” Come back a few Sundays
after Easter, and most churches aren’t as full.
Many people seem to have quickly returned to “normal”—which, for
increasing numbers in our world, doesn’t include regular Sunday worship.
Scripture reports that Jesus’
first followers had several encounters with him after the resurrection. During
one of these meetings, he told them explicitly to wait in Jerusalem until he returns—Acts 1:4-5. You would think
that this would be easy enough for them.
After all, they had just seen their friend and teacher—who was executed
on a Roman cross—standing in their midst, talking to them—even eating meals
with them. It seemed impossible to
believe, but Jesus was alive! They had
seen him with their own eyes! They
touched the nail-scarred hands. If
anyone ought to be able to wait on Jesus for a few days, it should be them.
But even when we see Jesus “face-to-face,” human
nature is hard to overcome.
When
Jesus doesn’t show after a few days, the disciples start getting
impatient. They hate waiting—just like you and I hate
waiting. They want to do something. So, they decide to “move on” from Jerusalem and
return to life as they knew it before they met Jesus.
Jesus finds a group of them fishing
along the Sea of Galilee, doing what they were doing when Jesus first called
them three years earlier—John 21. He finds two others walking on a road toward
Emmaus with their hopes and dreams shattered. These two apparently missed the
news of the resurrection entirely and are “headed home” to try and pick up the
pieces of their old lives and start over—Luke
24:13-35.
We can certainly relate to
those early believers. It’s hard to
wait! We live in an “on the next [1]”
culture. We want instant
gratification, and if we don’t get it, we move on. We have little tolerance for the wisdom of
the Psalmist: Be still… have hope… and wait for the Lord—Psalm 27:14.
If Jesus doesn’t show up the second we need him, immediately and obviously, we tend to assume that he’s not here—and that he’s not
coming.
But as the saying goes, “Good things come to those who wait.”
Whether living “ordinary”
life—e.g., sitting in beltway traffic or balancing family responsibilities—or
seeking “deeper truths” about our identity, God seems to have hard-wired waiting into the fabric of human
existence. Like it or not, there are some
things in life that can only be gained as we wait.
Strength for our journey is
found as we wait on God. Being
still, having hope, and other things we do to create space for God in our lives
can seem counterintuitive. But through these counter-cultural practices, we encounter Jesus, the Risen Lord, who
promises to defend us from our enemies, comfort us when we suffer, and lift us
up to sustain us on our journey.
As we step off life's treadmill, as we wait for The Lord, we begin to "see"
differently. No, the world has not changed, but we have...
We do not wait for the Lord so that we can escape the world and its problems, but
rather so we can engage the world
head-on with God's love and justice. As
we go forth to love and serve God, our friends—and even our enemies—as Jesus
did, God's glory shines in us and through us.
As we walk with our Risen
Lord, God's power and love pours out like rain on our parched souls and flows
to the world through us—through our bodies and through the Body of Christ. As
we wait, we are changed; we can never go back to the way things were. Once we encounter Jesus, we are never the same again...
[1] Those familiar
with the Sci-Fi channel’s show, “Ghost
Hunters,” may recognize this phrase.
Jason Hawes typically says it at the end of each investigation. I used it here to describe our culture’s
chronically short attention span.
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