In this strange season of pandemic, we find ourselves waiting.
Not all of us. Some have been swept into the center of the maelstrom: doctors and nurses, other hospital staff, medical supply chain, grocery workers, officials tasked with impossible decisions.
But most of us are waiting, some anxiously watching symptoms develop, in ourselves or loved ones, but far more of us just waiting, calendars swept clean, activities abandoned, conferences, competitions, rallies, receptions all dismantled. Indefinitely. For the foreseeable future. Weeks? Months? We don’t know.
Waiting does not come easily to humans of any age. We want schedules, deadlines, plans, explanations. If we must wait, tell us exactly how long. Give us a checklist, a calendar, a countdown clock.
We grieve the sudden death of goals and plans. We grieve the sudden strange expanse of time.
Wait.
My husband Whitney is reading through the Bible this year and occasionally reminding me of odd bits of scripture we’ve both read and forgotten, or never really noticed. This week he shared a passage from Numbers 9: God led the Israelites by a pillar of fire that would remain for days, weeks or a year. Over midday lunch we talked about the challenge in that: would the Israelites set up a full camp if only staying for a day or two? Would they plant lettuce and other greens if staying for a year? If they didn’t know, how could they use their time well? How do we use our own time well, when we don’t have an end in view?
I’m reminded of the passages in the gospels where Jesus invites his closest friends to wait for him. On the Mount of Transfiguration, where Peter, James and John dozed off while Jesus met with Elijah and Moses in glorious splendor. In the garden of Gesthemane where Jesus spent his last night on earth. He asked his friends to wait and watch with him. “When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy.”
I’m reminded of the passages in the gospels where Jesus invites his closest friends to wait for him. On the Mount of Transfiguration, where Peter, James and John dozed off while Jesus met with Elijah and Moses in glorious splendor. In the garden of Gesthemane where Jesus spent his last night on earth. He asked his friends to wait and watch with him. “When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy.”
Those brief episodes hold a clue to the essential work done in waiting: Watch. Watch while you wait. Keep your eyes open. Be ready.
I’ve been encouraged by people around me who are looking for creative ways to connect in a season of isolation. My husband has been spending time every evening making calls to people who might be alone or need encouragement. Our church is now offering the daily office, a short friendly reading and reflection at noon, and learning to livestream a Sunday service. Musicians are providing pop-up concerts online. A children’s artist offers daily doodle sessions, encouraging young children to doodle along and explore art in a fun new way.
But I wonder: will more be needed? Much more? As thousands lose their jobs, as medical facilities reach capacity, as human need presses in around us: many will need more than remote connection. What then? How do we help?
While we watch for ways to help and connect in this immediate crisis, we also need to watch the interplay of larger structures, and begin asking harder questions:
While we watch for ways to help and connect in this immediate crisis, we also need to watch the interplay of larger structures, and begin asking harder questions:
- Does fractured, privatized, for-profit medicine provide a platform for effective treatment, or are nations better served by a unified, national, single-player plan?
- Do some economic structures incentive protection of the public good more effectively than our own?
- What role should government play in a global crisis? Do we all pay a cost when professional roles are politicized in a way that rewards partisan allegiance and devalues expertise?
- Who is responsible for hourly workers when their work is summarily canceled?
- Who is responsible for rural communities when health care is no longer profitable?
Wait. Watch. Wonder.
Another point of interest, shared by Whitney in his brief wanders through the house between conference calls with his American Bible Society colleagues: in 1527, the bubonic plague swept through Europe. Martin Luther wrote a letter to his friend Rev. John Hess:
I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated above. See this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.How will I respond if my neighbor needs me?
Who is my neighbor in this time of trouble?
But there's more here than wondering about what I should do, what we, as a people, a church, a nation, should do.
There's the promise, again and again, that when we wait, we see God act. We come to know God better. We learn to see what's real.
Is that possible?
I wonder as I watch and wait.
I’ve been sharing songs from the Porter’s Gate project, but that project has pointed me toward another, launching tomorrow: Pray as You Stay. I’ll be checking it out. Join me.
