1. Advent
The
Advent season is now in full swing. I don't know about you, but sometimes I get
this panicky feeling when I realize that Christmas is just around the corner. There
is so much to do: shopping for gifts, innumerable Christmas parties to attend at
school, sport clubs, church, getting organized for out-of-town guests, etc.
This hustle and bustle seems to fly in the face of what the Advent season is
all about: waiting. It used to be a season set apart for expectant waiting on
the coming of Jesus at Christmas.
2. "Wait a minute!"
But
waiting is not restricted to Advent and the Christmas season. Waiting is a
universal phenomenon.
Ethan,
my then six year old, was standing at my side while I was typing at the
computer. He questioned me again about something he wanted. Honestly, I cannot
even remember what it was about. "Wait a minute," was my answer to
him. Upon hearing this he retorted: "Does 'wait a minute' always mean
never, Mom?" Ouch.
Waiting
is a common, universal human experience. It does not matter how old you are,
what race you are, what gender you are, what country you are from. Waiting is
and will always be part of your human experience. Waiting is also something we
do not find easy because it reveals to us that we are not in ultimate control. Try
to convince a newborn baby to wait on
the next feeding, or a toddler to wait
while food is on his highchair tray in front of him. Waiting on the delayed
arrival of a baby still in the womb can be unbearable. Waiting for that perfect
man to appear, or for a job offer or on exam results can be torture to us
because we are neither in control of the passage of time nor of the certainty
of the results.
Another
difficulty we have with waiting, is that it never really comes to an end until
we die. No sooner than we have received that for which we were waiting, we start
waiting for the next thing. We always tend to believe that what comes next will
be bigger and better than our current situation. As a child, I felt like I
could hardly wait to be grown up because then, life would really start. When I
was a student, I could hardly wait to graduate so I could be a part of the
adult world, the real world. Once I graduated, I could hardly wait to find a
husband because then I would be truly happy. Once I got married, I started
thinking that having children would make me even happier. Once I had children
and was in the baby stage, I started waiting with great expectation for the
time when my child would finally sleep though the night. Once my children were
toddlers, I could hardly wait for them to be old enough to speak, to be
toilet-trained, to go to pre-school in the morning so I could finally have a
little time to myself. And so it keeps going on and on....
3. Waiting involves
longing
The
truth is that waiting is such an existential part of our life, because waiting,
at its core is about longing. There is an emptiness in us that makes us long
for more, for something bigger and better that what we are or have now. We long
for meaning and security. We long to be known and loved and appreciated. We
long for beauty and justice. We long for things to be just right, or even perfect.
That sense of longing can appear in all areas of our lives, be it relational,
professional, emotional, physical, spiritual,
intellectual, you name it. Why do we long for things to be better? Is
our human experience just about the survival of the fittest, as Darwinian,
evolutionistic thought would tell us? One might agree that the desire to
survive, to reproduce and protect oneself is part of the survival of the
fittest...but what about the longing for love, and beauty and justice, dignity
and self-sacrifice? These concepts cannot be explained from an atheistic,
evolutionary vantage point because these things are completely irrelevant to
the concept of survival of the fittest, in fact they even hinder it. My father
recently wrote a birthday email to my son on his 14th birthday. I want to share
a portion of it with you:
"I preached this morning from Psalm 8 (he is a
minister) which teaches about the person of God and human dignity. I mentioned
Eric Liddell, a Scotsman, winner of the men's 400 meters at the 1924 Summer
Olympics in Paris. He had the world record for the 100 meters but would not run
in the finals because they were staged on a Sunday (you may recall this was the
theme of the movie Chariots of Fire.)
The Japanese polytheists and the Chinese Marxist 63 years later recognized true human dignity
in this man. After his Olympic success he went as a missionary to China, and
was imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1943 where he served the sick and the
dying, until, on February 21, 1945, five
months before liberation, he died of overwork and malnourishment. In 2008 near
the time of the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese authorities revealed information
from 1945 that had somehow been preserved by the Japanese that Liddell had refused
an opportunity to leave the camp and instead gave his place to a
pregnant woman. He gave his life to save this woman, and it only became known
63 years later. The Japanese were amazed and shared their amazement with the
Chinese who made it known in 2008. That is the way Jesus lived. That is true
maturity, and eventually people recognize it. You are in my prayers that you
will have this goal, Christ-like maturity, always before you."
Darwinian
survivalism leaves no room for this sort of behavior, nor can it explain it.
Liddel surely had waited and longed
for his own release, he probably fantasized about it in his daydreams. But when
the time came, he was able to relinquish it and give his place to a pregnant
woman. What enabled him to do that?
4. Waiting shows us we
are made for something more
I
would love to propose that the waiting we experience and the longing we feel
when we have to wait is a sign to us that we were made for something more than
just this world. Have you ever thought of that? If this world is all there is,
why is it that we long for things this world can never really offer? C.S Lewis,
a writer and Oxford professor wrote "If I find in myself a desire which no
experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I
was made for another world" (Mere
Christianity). Another author, Saint Augustine, an early church father,
wrote in a well-known prayer to God: "You made us for yourself, and our
hearts are restless until they rest in you."
5. That something more
is God himself
This
is an amazing proposition! God made us for himself! For relationship with him.
The restlessness we experience comes from expecting other things to truly
satisfy us and fill that God-shaped void.
The
incident at the computer with my son Ethan got me thinking about God as our
heavenly Father. He sometimes says "wait a minute" to us too. He is
not a heavenly vending machine built to give us what we want, when we want at the push of a button. Sometimes
those minutes turn into weeks, months, or years. But the delay in his answer is
not because he is too busy to deal with us, too wrapped up in himself to notice
us or that our requests are unimportant to him. God certainly doesn't mean
"never" when He says "wait." In fact, 99% of the Bible
could be wrapped up in one word: "wait." Humans alienate themselves
from God when they decide they know best...In fact, the very first human
described in the Bible, Adam, made God his enemy when he failed to wait on God.
He, being proud and impatient, took his life into his own hands. Yet, even after his great failure, God promised Adam
that a descendant of his would reconcile humanity with God. Thousands of years
later (now that's a long wait!), God sent his son, Jesus to this earth to do
this very thing: to open up the way for us to have a relationship with God
again. Through Jesus, who made a way for us by dying on the cross, the God-sized
void in our hearts can be filled again.
Is
there a longing in your heart that you recognize this day as a deep longing for
God? If you do, the good news is that Jesus can satisfy that longing. All it
takes is to recognize your emptiness, your need of him, believe that he paid
for your sins on the cross and receive his forgiveness. When we do this, we
receive a new identity as children of God. And when we have God's approval, we
don't need to strive for the approval of men. When we have God's love, we can
live without the love of a man. When we have God's forgiveness, we can afford
to not take revenge on those who have harmed us. It is this new sense of fulfilled
identity that gave Eric Liddell the ability to forfeit his freedom and give
it to another. Jesus gives us everything we need for life and happiness. All
of our longings can be satisfied in him because He promises us life in full. He
also said that he would come again and set all things aright and that we would
live with him forever. So even our desire for a perfect, peaceful and unending
world filled with joy will be satisfied through Him someday. But for that, we
have to wait.
6. But wait...
I
can hear your skeptical question,
because I have it too: So why do we still struggle with waiting even though
Jesus has already come?
This
answer may not satisfy you completely, but it does helps me in my doubts. The
answer is really more of a question. Could it be that the waiting contains a
message and a meaning almost just as significant as the answer itself? Waiting
entails longing. Maybe not getting
what we want right away forces us to long for God's presence instead of his presents.
The Advent season and waiting for Christmas is not really a good analogy for
me. Not that it is bad to "wait for Christmas" but, really, that's
looking back to an event that already took place. Waiting for Jesus' return is a much more fitting,
up-to-date biblical paradigm that challenges me to truly wait, walking by
faith, not by sight. Jesus told us in the Bible that he would return "in a
minute."
C.S
Lewis describes that moment when our earthly waiting will come to an end in his
children's book, The Last Battle
which is a part of the Narnia Series. In this series, 4 children travel to a
magical land called Narnia and encounter a Lion named Aslan, who is a picture
of Jesus. In the last book, at the very end Aslan ushers the children into his
country. This is what Lewis writes:
“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but
the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I
cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can
most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only
the beginning of the real story. All
their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the
cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the
Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which
every chapter is better than the one before.”
Waiting
on Chapter One of the great story challenges us to trust him. To believe him.
To wait on him. Can you and I live in the gap, between what we know to be true
and what we believe will be true? Can we wait in this season of Second Advent,
not with passivity but with action, like Eric Liddell, that shows we believe
God doesn't mean "never"
when he says "wait"?
