Waiters

    I’m not a very good waiter. No, I don’t mean the kind that brings out the food at a nice restaurant. Some of you have witnessed me nearly knocking over the lit baptismal candle during a ceremony by clipping the base with my size 16 shoes. Me delivering a platter of glassware and hot food is just plain asking for trouble. I’m talking about being a wait-er: someone who has trouble waiting.

I often find myself waiting for the next thing in life to arrive. And by the time it does, I’m impatiently waiting for the next thing to happen. Waiting for warm days to finally arrive. Waiting for my kids' activities to wrap up for the season. Waiting for my mustache to grow in how I’d like it to look (as a living tribute to Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 film Tombstone). And by the time those things finally do arrive, I’m on to waiting for something else. As the saying goes, “the watched kettle never boils.” How about you?

I once heard it said that patience takes a special kind of courage. Especially in the era of Amazon Prime Same-Day Shipping, instant answers to inquiries in the palm of our hands, and a news cycle that seems to change headlines as often as we blink. I found it amusing the first time I learned the church calendar’s longest stretch is called “ordinary time.” My green stole will get a workout this summer! But what if “ordinary time” isn’t a bad thing? What if time itself is something that is never ordinary? In fact, all time is anything but ordinary! Even the time we spend waiting.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 tells us that “For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven…” For better or worse, this includes waiting. As well as other less-desirable things such as grieving, crying, and enduring. But it also includes celebrating, laughing, and thriving. There is only one moment we can truly engage with and that is, you guessed it: the present. As we wait for summer’s arrival, it can be easy to miss the precious gift of the present moment. The ordinary time and times.

I’ve told other parents with children younger than my own to try and appreciate the ordinary moments that can sometimes feel exhausting while parenting. Because the “last” times often happen unbeknownst to us. After helping my children with thousands of bath times since they were each born, at some point and unbeknownst to me, I was helping each of  them for the last time. All those thousands ordinary moments of playing bath toys with them, singing to, and helping them were suddenly done. And the kicker is that I was most likely missing the full present moment because I was waiting for bedtime so I could have a little more peace and quiet. I’d give a lot to go back to redo a last bath, playground adventure, or bedtime story with them. I think I’d appreciate every moment of one more opportunity a lot more than before.

Please hear me, as Christ followers we can be confident that God will waste nothing that we entrust God with. Including the moments we wish we had cherished more. And if my bathtime story resonated with you, perhaps my regret is your gain. What I hope you hear in these ponderings is that you and I have been given a gift that comes in 24 hour payments. And those disbursements will be spent whether we like it or not. Some of it has to be used for things like work, sleep, and yes, even waiting. But in the midst of our journey through each day, we have the opportunity to see the extraordinary in our ordinary moments.