Expectancy

More than anything else, my living room feels more like a hospital waiting room right now. Don’t know if it’s more like a maternity ward or a geriatric wing. By God’s grace I’ve not been in either in my lifetime, not yet. But I’m very fretful for my dear roommate, whom I’ve not heard from in over two hours, even though she’s just upstairs in her room. She’s having a conversation she’s not been looking forward to and I know it will be hard on her. It seems unfair that such a good person should have to suffer so. Just for being in love.

But fairness isn’t the promise, is it? Perseverance is.

Much harder to measure that.

What else do we wait for? Acceptance letters to college. Job offers. Even more excruciating, calls for job interviews. Airplanes. Security clearances. (Ask Sarah about that one some time if you have an hour to spare… kidding…) We wait for a lot of things. But how much time do I spend waiting on the Lord? Or is it not about a beginning and end, set times and seasons, but an ongoing process of waiting for eternity?

There is the school that says eternity has already begun. Which is true. If Christ doesn’t return in our lifetime, we will experience death, albeit for a moment, but our eternal life is already secure. Yet it’s going to be so completely different and outside our realm of ability to ask or imagine or think, how can we even count these days as credit toward eternity? It seems to bolster the credit of these days, or diminish those of Heaven. Neither option seems wise. So do we wait for eternity – is that what it means to wait on the Lord?

It’s raining tonight. We’ve got a classic hurricane-remnants-and-Virginia-summer-humidity thing going on at the moment. All in all, it’s quiet. Allis is resting on the plaid chair. (For those of you who haven’t seen it and are taking mental pictures, don’t worry, it’s a tasteful plaid.) Enya is playing on our sound system. The fridge is humming. And if you listen closely you can hear big rain drops – I think it’s between fronts at the moment, so it’s only the drops that have collected on the trees and slowly gathered, tricking down branches and leaves, to finally make a final flight to rest on the earth a while. Till God in His providence causes them to rise again.

If raindrops could think, I wonder if they, too, would anticipate the time they will return to the heavens.