Waiting. That’s what God has been teaching me lately.
And it’s not even me at the front of the classroom, waiting for the teacher to arrive with the test results.
It’s my brother. And he isn’t waiting for a teacher.
My brother waits for a doctor, not just any doctor. It’s a specialist who will have information clarifying the direction of my brother’s life.
But he has had to wait: first one test. Wait. Then another test. Wait. And another. Wait. Then, a biopsy. Wait, wait, wait.
Samuel Becket’s play, Waiting on Godet, does not (spoiler alert) end well, at least if you’re looking for a confirmation that everything will be fine. Becket has the characters Vladimir and Estragon wait on Godet, who instills hope with hints of his arrival and, with it, the expectation that Godet will have the answer to the meaninglessness of their life’s existence. They wait. Their suffering increases. But Godet never shows. It’s sad.
Waiting isn’t easy. It can be depressing. In the Christmas Special (2022) of Call the Midwife, a train wreck immobilizes Dr. Turner and Sister Julienne, the Sister with internal injuries and Dr. Turner with head trauma. Sister Julienne reflects while they wait for their rescue. Between painful breaths, she says: “So much of my life has been about waiting. Waiting for the telephone to ring. Waiting for babies to arrive. Waiting for God. And even He can take His time.”
Dr. Turner recognizes that the accident has reversed their roles. It’s he, the Doctor, and her, the midwife, who need rescuing this time, so he responds, “People wait for us, usually. We’re the cavalier.” She immediately corrects his malapropism, “You mean the cavalry.”
We sometimes feel God is cavalier, don’t we? We are at His behest. As Sister Julienne said, “Even He can take His time.”
Waiting in and of itself is not the key. It’s how and for whom we wait.
Something positive, though frustrating and painful, can happen in the waiting.
The Hebrew prophet Isaiah spoke of waiting on God to a people living for several decades in exile. Isaiah offered hope. But it was a specific kind of waiting. The word the prophet uses for “waiting” in Isaiah 40:31 has at its root the concept of “binding” or “twisting,” connoting tension. It originally meant something like eagerly looking for something, as in twisting and turning in anticipation of someone or something’s arrival. And within that twisting and turning, the person waiting in hope gets “wound up,” or “strengthened.” It’s an active waiting.
In the New Testament, an unruly crowd severely beat Paul and Silas with wooden rods, then imprisoned them in a dungeon, clamping their feet with stocks. The two waited by singing praises and worshipping God. And help did come, maybe not as soon as they would have liked, but in the story, the prison walls shook, the doors opened, and Paul and Silas walked out, free men. They found strength in the tension of waiting.
But even if it hadn’t happened, even were it a disappointing Godet who teased but never arrived—not at midnight, the following day, or ever—the wait would still have been transformative, for God does come to us, even if His absence seems prolonged, even permanent. There would be a time when the Romans would take Paul’s life. Tradition tells us he was beheaded. From the human perspective, God wasn’t there that day.
But look again.
And remember: The Cross of Christ.
Where was God?
We can thank God for that day because God’s absence on Calvary made God’s presence on Easter a reality.
Even as they bound Jesus on the Cross, he waited and, in the waiting, He found the strength to endure a shameful, solitary death and, by God’s grace, to fly like an eagle, resurrected, victorious, so that you and I can find hope in the pain of our present moment and victory in the fears of tomorrow. Facing life’s unpleasant, even impossible circumstances, we discover strength we didn’t know we had.
So, in life’s desperation, look for Him on the horizon, just above the eastern sky.
The Doctor will arrive soon enough.
The Calvary will show up.
And He is not cavalier.