People of Hope:
This year, our midweek Advent worship theme is God of Wonders: Waiting With Awe. This past Wednesday we gathered for worship at 7 p.m. to sing Holden Evening Prayer, to read and discuss scripture, and, in the process, to consider the awesome nature of God in the midst of our Advent wait. We will do the same this coming Wednesday, December 13th at 7 p.m.
There are many ways to wait.
I remember the first time I drove through the intersection of McDowell Road, 19th Avenue, and Grand Avenue, in central Phoenix, probably in 2011. I remember it because I was so annoyed by how long I had to wait at the stoplight. That day, I vowed to myself that I would entirely avoid that intersection in the future. Ha! Five years later, I bought my house, which is a quarter of a mile from that intersection, and I sit at that stoplight on an almost-daily basis. Each day as I leave the house, I designate a task to complete while I wait at the light. Sometimes, I sit there for a full 4 minutes, so I can answer a fair number of emails and text messages in that time (don’t do what I do 😊). I can mentally prepare a Faith in Motion or even finish breakfast. I fill my wait at the stoplight with tasks in order to be productive. I wait with impatience.
In 2009, when I still lived in northeast Iowa, I drove to Rochester, Minnesota, to sit at the hospital bedside of a family friend who was dying of brain cancer. Eric had been a youth pastor, full of energy and creative ideas and still sleeping on church floors on mission trips and canoeing in the Boundary Waters. One day, when he went to the doctor because he thought he had an ear infection, he came back from his appointment to tell us — his family and friends — that he had a brain tumor. At the moment I arrived in Rochester, he was in a particularly difficult stage of his illness. His wife and daughter and I sat together and talked, watched him struggle to breathe and waited. We were petrified, and in our petrified waiting, one of his daughter’s good friends showed up with her two young children. After hugging us all, Fernanda found lotion in her bag and gently massaged Eric’s hands and feet. After that, she came and knelt in front of each one of us and tenderly rubbed the lotion into our hands, too. She told stories about her children, and we laughed at their antics. We had been waiting with dread for Eric’s inevitable last breath, but Fernanda waited with gentleness and care.
Whatever we are waiting for this Advent, there are many ways to wait. We may wait with impatience or dread. We may wait with gentleness and care. We may wait in any number of ways. Regardless, God is up to something in our world, at Esperanza, in our lives. God may not work on our timeline, so we sometimes have to wait. How we go about waiting is something we get to choose.
This Advent, we explore what it means to wait with awe.
With awe and anticipation,
Pastor Sarah