“What are you waiting for?” can often be less a question than a declarative nudge to get started or to get moving on a project. Its corollary is, “there’s no time like the present!” There’s often a sense of urgency in the voice of someone offering these prompts: get going, don’t dawdle.
Of course, there’s also a pragmatic meaning to this question. What am I waiting for? Well, as I write this, I’m mostly waiting on updated weather reports and, ultimately, waiting on the arrival of the snow and ice that is forecast for this weekend. So, in this case, waiting looks a lot like going to the grocery store (there’s no time like the present for getting milk!) and picking up a few books I’ve been meaning to read. I’m waiting to see what happens, planning as well as possible, and thinking through a lot of scenarios for Calvary-folk and for my family and neighbors.
Turns out, though, there’s also a hidden spiritual practice in this question that isn’t at all about urgency or plowing forward. What are you waiting for? Put another way, what I am waiting for might also be what am I hoping for? What am I waiting for becomes what am I looking for?
These are much bigger questions. And rather than shoving me into motion, these questions stop me in my tracks. Because to answer them, I have to slow down and remember a much larger story. What am I hoping for, expecting, looking for? A lot more than a cold front. If I answer on the run, I probably won’t say that I’m waiting on the kingdom, but somewhere in my heart of hearts, that is actually what I’m waiting on. Waiting with a lot of other people in a lot of other places and at a lot of different times; waiting on justice, hoping for love, looking for mercy.
Waiting, as a friend and I often remind each other, is not the same thing as being patient. Patience is a way of being, a capacity. Waiting, though it may seem like an oxymoron, is in fact an activity. And we can wait patiently or impatiently. Hear that I’m not saying that one way is better than the other; there’s a strong case to be made that we ought to be impatient for God’s kingdom. And we can also do things while we wait. We can tap a foot or a car horn, we can scroll, we can huff and recite silently or aloud all the reasons this wait is inconvenient. We can also look around and look to the horizon to see some sign that our wait will soon come to an end, which often looks like the person in the check-out line ahead of me finally swiping his credit card and pushing his cart away.
But what does it look like to look around for the kingdom while we wait? What might we see on the horizon that resembles justice or mercy? I’ll be the first to say that it’s really hard to see anything that looks like love in what I’m scrolling through on my phone. And somehow it seems like the horizon of goodness keeps getting farther away. But it’s also true that when I really look hard, when I slow down enough to do more than scan a headline, when I stop, take a breath, and listen, I can hear stories of compassion and courage and even joy – all around me, every day, in the midst of every line I stand in or person who’s in my way. After all, they’re in my way, along the same way I’m going. Being still and present makes these glimpses of the kingdom easier to find, though being still and present isn’t always easy.
So, maybe it’s also true that there’s no time like the present, like this moment right now, to remember what I’m waiting on, what we’re all really waiting for.
What are you waiting for?