While You Wait

We do a lot of waiting in this world. I do not like to wait. I do not know anyone who does. But that doesn’t change things. Checkout lines. Flights. Restaurants. Traffic lights. Labor and Delivery. DMV. All places of waiting. I doubt we make it through a single day without waiting for something.

There is an unmistakable subtext of waiting in the Scriptures. We are all waiting for what God is going to do next. Beyond that we are waiting for what God is going to do in the end, whenever it gets here.

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then – I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn’t, luckily, have to bother about that.  ~Agatha Christie

Contemplating our lives, we can become lost in reverie over the past. At some point, though, all must consider the future. Peter tells his scattered readers that we hang on to hope “…until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.” Paul recognized an inner struggle as we “wait eagerly…we wait for it patiently.” Eagerly or patiently, we still wait. Paul wrote to Titus to say that while we are living, we are also waiting. We are to live a certain kind of life “While we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Maybe next time we’re waiting … eagerly and patiently … we can ask God to remind us that we are living in the shadow of Someone yet to come. And that changes the tint and hue of our daily lives, doesn’t it? What difference does that make to you?

John