Thoughts for the Week—August 2008
Thought for the Week: 8/04/08—Waiting
There is waiting, and then there is waiting.
When you are battening down the hatches for a storm, even one that looks like it may not be much, you are working toward something you
don’t want to get here. It’s not like anticipating Christmas or your birthday when you were little, squirming with excitement at the thought.
It’s the very opposite—a little prayer, perhaps, that it just won’t be all that bad. That it will all go away and leave us alone.
I wonder if our attitude toward God things isn’t rather more like that. I mean, he’s very big and grand, and handy in a pinch, but he
certainly does intrude in our plans and expectations, doesn’t he? Like the school chaplain played by Michael Palin in Monty Python’s The
Meaning of Life: “O Lord, you are so very, very big—please do not squash us…” (I have always wanted to pray that in school chapel.
Someday…)
Fear has something to with that, but it is not, I suspect, the main point. We don’t want to be interrupted or imposed upon. We want God
(and pretty much everyone else) to be available in a pinch, when we need him/them—a handy resource, but otherwise, just leave us be to
run things the way we like.
Of course it doesn’t work that way. We aren’t running things, and we can’t. And when we try, we mess them up royally. So we find
ourselves waiting for someone to fix it all, grim and grumbling, just wanting to get it all over.
But the waiting that heals and makes us whole is another thing entirely. To wait upon the Lord, in quietness and confidence, is to compose
ourselves before the universe and its creator, to know who we are and whose we are. To know and embrace our limits and our infinite
possibilities…in the right hands. True waiting is to see the grandeur of the storm awaited, with the off-planet perspective: knowing the glory
and the beauty of the storm’s eye and the torque, not blown by the winds and the rain, but certain of the bountiful gift of new life that even
the strongest blast will bring. No fear, but abiding, and waiting on the Lord. Let that be us, in all the storms life brings.
Thought for the Week: 8/11/08—In the Fullness of Time
I used to love the old Orson Welles’ wine commercial, where he looked so urbane, so sophisticated, so knowing, and he rumbled “We will
serve no wine before its time…” Lord, if I couldn’t grow up to be Gandalf the Wise, couldn’t I just please be Orson Welles without the
bad liver and the huge ego?
Well, it didn’t work out like that so far, but I do like his “text.” The more I live, the more sure I am the great sin of our age is rushing things.
We grow our children up too fast: poor Jon Benet Ramsey was the poster child for that long before her sad end. We desperately need to
learn to let kids be kids.
We burn steaks. We eat like we are still in first grade and have 15 minutes for lunch period.
We actually have people in a hurry to get on Medicare. Come on!
God ripens us with time. The patience and the submission to the slow and steady process of becoming something we are not yet is the very
essence of maturing in Christ.
Instant gratification is not a gift of the Spirit. The Lord took about 2000 years to get from saying “Hello!” and a promise to Abraham and
Sarah to delivering the baby that would deliver us all. He’s taken another 2K to season that Child’s work in all of us, and we haven’t
absorbed all the lessons yet, by a long shot.
God ripens us with time. He is growing a spirit in you and me that will be ripe for heaven, for communion with him that is the full sweet
wine of love fulfilled beyond time and for eternity. And in the fullness of time he will reveal in each of us, and through each of us, what he is
truly calling us to be: “…it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see
him as he is.” (I John 3:2) In the fullness of God’s time, we shall be his.
Thought for the Week: 8/18/08—Time’s Up!
Watching the Olympics brings lots of lessons, but the one that has struck me most is that moment of transition, the starting gun of the race
or event in which they compete. The athlete goes from the state of waiting tension to all-out effort in a mere instant. An explosion of
movement, speed, agility, skill and control dazzles us. In our games, these folks become for a moment pretty much what God had in mind
for human bodies to be able to do and give. Wow.
I’m no athlete—no one has ever accused me of that! But I observe with the highest respect the drive and self-discipline that has been the
long necessary prelude to every athlete’s performance. Each one has been given a body and potential that makes possible their art, but
they have honed and refined their abilities and skills by hard work and intense mental and physical effort. Potential is not enough, if you are
going to get out of the stands and onto the field of play.
And after all that practice, that sweat and pain and effort and planning, there is that sweet and precious moment, before the starting bell,
that hangs in the air with such promise and such hope. And suddenly time is up, it is here, and every molecule of the competitor’s being is
thrown into the effort.
There is a little of that for all of us, I hope, in this time of year. Around the church house, like the school house, we have planned and
worked to make a new year better than the last, and open up new vistas for the year to come. We come to Rally Day—First Day of
School, the New Season, whatever we call it—with our best hopes and expectations. But they are not enough.
What every effort, including being the Church, requires, is the full commitment of our every resource, the explosion of all our potential in the
all-out effort. There is a self-giving and a sacrifice there that is mystical and divine and profoundly Christ-like. Let us hold nothing back,
and find in the race the fulfillment of all our promise.
Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the
sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
Hebrews, 12:1
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