Kindergarten Student Claims School System Is Failing Her

After having to cancel six days of school because of snow already this winter, some New England school districts are considering the implementation of what they are calling the Alternate Transportation Plan. The ATP involves retrofitting current school buses with certain modifications that will allow them to travel safely in any weather conditions. These modifications include upgrading the vehicles' tires to 8 feet in size and fixing flame throwers to the front of every bus so that the drivers can melt any snow in their path. Due to the appearance of the retrofitted buses, some residents are referring to them as the "Monster-truck buses." Commenting on the plan, one school district superintendent says "Of course, we are concerned for the safety of our students but even more so we are concerned with maintaining our snow superiority over the rest of the country. We have a reputation to uphold."

Local residents agree with the superintendent's assessment of the situation. While they recognize the bus modifications will be paid for by their tax dollars, they believe it is the proper price tag for continuing to practice their snow snobbery. One mother with school age children stated: "We've all posted that meme on our facebook walls about Southerns closing everything down for 1/4 inch of snow while Northerners go to work with three feet of snow on top of their cars. I can't keep posting stuff like that if we are canceling school along with the rest of the country! Something has to be done!"

A Taxachussetts resident commented "My sister in Atlanta is already calling to say that her kids have missed fewer school days for snow than my kids. I've already started a petition showing support for a raise in taxes if that is what it takes to pay for these new buses."

When kindergarten student Hannah Young was asked what she thought about missing another day of school because of snow, she said "But we were supposed to have our Valentine's party today!" fighting back tears. Clearly, this school system is failing its students.

Other New England news outlets are reporting that the whole idea of "school buses" may have been a long term conspiracy by certain groups in the South to humiliate the North after the War of Northern Aggression (sometimes referred to as the Civil War). This comes as the most recent piece of evidence that the deepest divides in our country truly have centuries of history behind them. All Things New will not keep you posted on developments in this story as this is not an actual news website.
 

The Word Is Near You

In my last post, I argued that Paul was not setting up “faith” as an alternative to keeping the law. Neither is “faith” the opposite of works in the sense of trying to earn one’s own salvation, since no first century Jew had in mind to attempt that. Instead, Paul was arguing that faith(fulness) was actually the way to maintain and uphold the law all along because the law’s goal was always the faithfulness of Christ as opposed to the law being an end in itself.

Paul continues this train of thought throughout the rest of Romans 10. We see it almost immediately in v.6 when he writes “the righteousness based on faith says….” and he goes on to quote the law. It wouldn’t really make much sense to be quoting from Deuteronomy, itself a part of the law, if everything written in it were contrary to the faith Paul has been talking about. But since Paul has been arguing that faith(fulness) is actually the right way to pursue the law, it is perfectly logical to think that we might be able to find that idea somewhere in the Torah itself. So Paul quotes words from Deuteronomy that speak to the nearness of this law. It is so near in fact that “It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”

“That is the word of faith” - the one that is so near that it is actually in your mouth and heart rather than something that is external to you - “that we proclaim.” For so many chapters Paul has been talking about this righteousness that comes out of faithfulness and often he has only hinted at what that means, what that looks like in everyday life. It is submitting ourselves to righteousness, in chapter 6, walking by the Spirit in chapter 8. He will give us many more details in that regard starting in chapter 12. But here is another important hint - this “law of faith” is not something external to us but rooted deeply within our very being. Although Paul does not quote it here, one easily thinks of the words of Jeremiah 31 which are so often quoted in the New Testament where God promises to put his law within his people and write it on their hearts. This, I think, is why Paul can say “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” It is not because a few words passing through your lips once is all God wants. It is because the law of faithfulness is not something outside of us. It is something that is imprinted on our innermost being leading us to confess our allegiance to Jesus as Lord.

All this, however, only seems to make Israel’s rejection of Jesus all the more troubling for Paul. He acknowledges that perhaps not all have heard the message about the Messiah preached specifically to them but he says it is not as though haven’t heard at all. Psalm 19, which Paul quotes in v. 18, says that all of creation declares the glory of God. In Romans 1, Paul said this was the same reason that Gentiles were without excuse. Surely, his fellow Jews can not get off any easier. Neither is the problem that they haven’t understood. Isaiah describes his very own people as “disobedient and contrary”. As a result, God is using others who do not know God and have not sought God to incite his own people to jealousy. It is this idea on which Paul will expand in Romans 11.

The End of the Law

In the preceding verses, Paul has retold Israel’s story so as to show that God has always been making and remaking Israel, forming a remnant from Abraham descendants with the result that “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.” Now in 9:30 Paul pauses as he often does to ask a rhetorical question.

            “What shall we say then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it; that is, a righteousness that is by faith(fulness); but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law?”

The implied answer here is “Yes, that is exactly what we should say!”. In fact, it is what Paul has been saying through most of Romans 1-8. And it is that argument in Romans 1-8 we must remember if we are to understand what Paul is saying here. He is not merely advocating for faith over works as those of us raised in the Protestant tradition might expect at first glance. Instead, he is saying that Israel has done the same thing that Paul described himself as having done in Romans 7. Even as Paul “followed” the law by persecuting the Church, that pursuing of the law actually led Paul away from where God really wanted him to be. Likewise, Paul is saying here,  Israel sought righteousness through the law but even in keeping the law Israel did not succeed in really reaching the law’s goal (more on that in a moment).

In the next verse (32), Paul says that the reason Israel failed to reach the law’s goal is because they didn’t pursue it by faith(fulness) but as if it were by works. Once again, it is important to remember how Paul has used this language throughout his letter and not simply impose our own meaning on these words. When Paul has talked about “works” in Romans, he has had in mind specifically the works of the Jewish law; things like circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath observance, things that marked Israel off as Israel. So when he says that Israel pursued the law by works he is not admonishing his fellow Jews for trying to earn their salvation.  Instead, he is saying they’ve missed what it means to really fulfill the law; that truly reaching God’s law is not about ethnic identity markers. Similarly, when Paul has talked about faith(fulness) in Romans he has been referring to God’s faithfulness through Christ (often followed closely by faithful human response). Likewise, here Paul would be saying the law’s real goal is found not in maintaining Jewish ethnicity but in the faithfulness of God. And it is no coincidence that this is the same thing Paul has just been saying in the preceding verses (whereas arguing that righteousness comes by faith as trust or belief rather than works would have very little to do with anything Paul said in 9:1-29). Paul has just spent the whole chapter claiming that being Israel is not about ethnicity but about God’s faithfulness to his promises.

By pursuing the law as if its goal was maintaining the purity of Israel, Israel has stumbled over the stumbling block of God’s faithfulness in Christ. They failed to see that Christ was actually the law’s goal. That is what Paul means in 10:4 when he says “Christ is the end of the law.” Like its English counterpart, the Greek word telos does not always refer to the termination or cessation of something. It can also mean “end” in the sense of a goal or purpose and that is Paul’s meaning here. Christ is the point to which the law has been leading all along. Jesus is the summit of Israel’s story that Paul has been telling for the last 37 verses. Faith in Christ and the faithfulness of Christ are not the antithesis of the law. Paul is not arguing that Israel should give up the law and just “have faith” instead. He is saying that the way to really fulfill the law is through faith in and the faithfulness of the Messiah. He said as much all the way back in 3:31: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith(fulness)? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law!”.

Once again, we hear the echoes of that old friend who has always been close by as we’ve journeyed through the pages of Romans; the prophet Habakkuk. We are reminded of his assessment of Israel in his own day to which Paul alludes at the opening of his epistle. “The law is paralyzed; justice goes forth perverted” Habakkuk claims but “the righteous out of faith(fulness) will live.” In these verses of Romans 9 and 10, Paul has claimed that the law has essentially been paralyzed for Israel because they haven’t pursued it properly. The law was always meant to be fulfilled by living out of faith(fulness). In the remaining verses of Romans 10, Paul will enlist some of the passages of Scripture most central to Israel’s identity in the first century in order to argue further for this very point.

Anguish for Israel

Romans 8 closed with the exalted themes of new creation and the inability of this world’s suffering to separate us from Christ. Immediately in the opening verses of Romans 9 we get the sense that we have left those exalted heights behind for a much more somber matter. Paul does not indicate to us at first what the topic of these next chapters will be but he does indicate to us immediately that the topic will be serious. He begins with not one, not two, but three assertions of the truthfulness of what he is about to say - “(1) I am speaking the truth in Christ, (2) I am not lying, (3) my conscience bears witness in the Holy Spirit.” And the thing about which Paul asserts in triplicate that he is telling the truth is that he has “great sorrow and unceasing anguish”. It is only in v.3 that we even begin to get an idea of what Paul is so upset about and even there he doesn’t spell it out exactly. We only know that Paul is concerned about Israel, his kinsmen. We learn over the next three chapters that Paul is deeply and personally troubled by the fact that so few of his own countrymen have come to see Jesus as their Messiah.

Despite much of Israel’s rejection of Jesus, Paul claims “It is not as though the word of God has failed.” After 2000 years of mostly Gentile Christianity, one might wonder what Israel’s rejection of Jesus has to do with the failure or success of God’s word. But if we are to understand Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11, we must see that they have everything to do with each other. That is because the word of God to which Paul is referring is the promises God made to Israel - promises that they would be God’s people and the heirs of God’s kingdom. If those very same people who are now rejecting the Messiah who came to fulfill those promises while Gentiles are simultaneously accepting that same Messiah and thereby inheriting the promises originally meant for Israel, we might ask “Has God abandoned Israel? Has God simply taken what he promised to Israel and arbitrarily given it to others?” Paul’s emphatic answer throughout these three chapters will be “Absolutely not!”

That answer begins in the second half of verse six and the first half of verse seven. God’s word has not failed because “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring.” It is that idea for which Paul will argue over the next 22 verses and he will do it by recounting the story of Israel.

If you are going to recount the story of Israel, Abraham would be a natural place to begin and that is what Paul does. Paul quotes Genesis 21:12 which God spoke to Abraham; “through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” In other words, Isaac wasn’t Abraham’s only son. Ishmael was just as much the flesh and blood of Abraham as Isaac so if bloodlines were what mattered then Ishmael’s descendants would have been Israel as much as Isaac’s. Paul is arguing that “Israel” was never defined by physical descendancy. It was always about those to whom God made his promises. The same is true, Paul declares, with Isaac and Rebekah’s sons, Esau and Jacob. Esau was just as much Isaac’s son as Jacob. In fact, Esau was the firstborn with every right to his father’s inheritance and blessing. Additionally, Jacob was no saint but a liar and deceiver. In spite of all that, God chose to enact his promises through Jacob who would later be renamed Israel. Once again, being Israel was never about simply being of the lineage of Abraham. It was about God fulfilling his promises to Abraham through whomever he chose.

This emphasis on God’s choice leads to a natural question. Is God unjust? If it is all about God’s choice apart from any human standard of worthiness, does that make God arbitrary and unfair? Not surprisingly, Pauls says no, and he turns to the next scene in Israel’s story, also God’s greatest act of justice in Israel’s story, to make the point. Paul claims along with Exodus 9:16 that God actively hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he would not repent. But God did this for the express purpose of showing mercy to the Israelite slaves. To be sure, God made a choice but it was a choice for the salvation of a people. It was the choice that made Israel.

Paul says the same is true in the final movement of Israel’s history prior to the Messiah: the exile. When Paul starts talking about some vessels prepared for destruction and others for glory in v.22-23, many assume that those “vessels” are a metaphor for individuals, some of whom are predestined for hell while others are predestined for heaven from before birth. While I won’t deny that Paul had a very strong sense of the sovereignty of God - I would guess nearly every first century Jew did and that even most Gentiles took for granted some notion of fate or divine providence - I don’t think a Calvinist doctrine of double individual predestination is exactly what he has in mind here. This is because, once again, Paul is not telling the story of individuals. He is telling the story of Israel and when he uses the language of a potter and clay anyone who knows Israel’s story will know that he is echoing the prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 18, God tells Jeremiah that Israel is like clay in God’s hands and that God can make or remake Israel as God pleases. This is precisely what Paul has been arguing all along: God is (and really has always been) remaking Israel, even to the point of calling those who were not God’s people “my people” as Hosea says.

More specifically, God is remaking Israel into a remnant of Israel. Paul believes that much as Isaiah claimed that God reduced Israel to just a remnant of Israel in the time of exile so also was God currently reducing Israel to a remnant in Paul’s day. But we will see later in chapter 11, that Paul does not expect this to be Israel’s permanent condition. Instead, this remnant of Israel will eventually lead to the full salvation of Israel. Much like the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart led to the redemption of an entire people, so the current hardening of Israel is meant for salvific purposes as well.

Paul’s claim in this chapter has been that “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.” Paul demonstrated this through Israel’s story. Starting with Abraham, then Isaac, Jacob and on through the Exodus and the Exile, God has always been making and remaking Israel. Israel has never really been all the physical descendants of Abraham because from the moment God chose Isaac rather than Ishmael, a remnant within Abraham’s descendants was being formed. Paul believes that this is what is happening is his own day; a remnant is being formed around Jesus out of Jews and Gentiles that will eventually be the salvation of his kinsmen, Israel. 

Suffering New Creation Into Existence

The final verses of Romans 8 decidedly bring to a close a large section of Paul’s argument in Romans. Throughout these 8 chapters, Paul has been laying out rather systematically his understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He identified the problem of the human condition; that no one is righteous because we are all, Jew and Gentile alike, powerless before the overwhelming force of sin. But God has acted decisively in the person of Jesus Christ, revealing a righteousness apart from the Law. This righteousness is possible because the resurrection of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit have inaugurated a new age, an entirely new epoch in history. We are able to participate in this new reality by means of baptism and our own willingness to walk according to the Spirit. Due to the presence of the Spirit in this completely new age, we are able to fulfill the righteous requirements of the law in a way that was not a possibility prior to Christ. Furthermore, this possibility of holiness is a sign of what God intends to do for all of creation; remaking it and setting things right so that all of creation is transformed and God’s righteousness and peace reign in the world.

Of course, Paul knows that remaking has not been completed yet. It has only just begun in the communities of Christ followers springing up around the Roman Empire; little colonies of new creation taking root in the midst of the old. But that old creation with all of its ways of destruction and sin, injustice and unrighteousness is still quite prevalent. It is so prevalent, in fact, that more often than not, one might find it difficult to see the presence of the new creation at all. It might be easy to begin to wonder if such a hope for things to be made new is only a fool’s dream. In the midst of so much tragedy, so much hunger, pain, grief, and injustice, can we really say that God is doing a work of new creation among us? Paul’s answer is not only a resounding yes but also an assurance that the very things we might imagine are signs of our separation from Christ are actually opportunities to be conformed to his image. This, I think, is the heart of what Paul intends to communicate in the final verses of Romans 8.

Most telling in this regard is the quotation in v. 36. It follows the central question of this passage in v. 35.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘for your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’”

Surely, this list of dangers combined with the image of helpless sheep is not a comforting thought. Paul first cites all the marks of the old creation in our world, all the things that might cause us to wonder if the Spirit of Christ is really doing this work of new creation among us or not. Paul follows this question with a quotation from Psalm 44 which lists some of the very same concerns before God. The Psalmist says that God has forgotten and rejected his people, leaving them to the affliction of their enemies and selling them for a low price. In fact, in the verses immediately after what Paul has quoted, the Psalmist calls upon God to wake up! In times of suffering, it is easy for the faithful to wonder if God has gone off and taken a nap. Otherwise, why wouldn’t God be here doing something about our plight?

But Paul understands suffering differently. Rather than seeing suffering as something that represents our separation from Christ, he claims it is actually something that brings us closer to and makes us more like the Christ who suffered himself. Contrary to Psalm 44, Paul says “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us!” Paul ironically claims that it is by our suffering that we actually conquer because it is in those losses that we become more like the Christ who conquered sin and death by his suffering.

Once again, context is exceedingly important at this point. Without it, we may very well misunderstand and dismiss Paul in a number of ways: as a naive optimist who utters platitudes about a suffering he has never himself experienced, as a determinist who thinks everything comes pre-planned with no choice left for us, or as a masochist who sees suffering as inherently good. But what we know of Paul won’t bear out any of those caricatures. Paul was a man who knew suffering in all its ugliness but came to see it differently in light of Christ.

We must also remember that Paul was speaking into a culture in which all these things... tribulation, persecution, famine, etc... are sure signs of abandonment by one’s god(s). Almost certainly, Jesus’ own suffering was one of the reasons why Paul initially rejected Jesus as the Messiah. If Jesus had really been the Messiah, he would not have succumbed to such a humiliating death. But when Paul accepted the one who suffered as the Christ, he recognized that meant also accepting that the way of the Christ was the way of suffering. Contrary to the popular belief of Paul’s day, Paul had come to see in Christ that suffering was not an obstacle somehow contrary to God’s nature but that it was essential to truly knowing the heart of God. In repeated and various ways, Paul reminds us throughout his writings that if we are to know Christ we must share in the fellowship of his sufferings.

So when Paul says that “for those who love God all things work together for good,” he isn’t saying everything will be always be peachy or your suffering isn’t really that bad or that you should look a little harder for the silver lining that explains how this seemingly bad thing is really a good thing. He is saying that your suffering isn’t for nothing. He’s saying that your suffering isn’t a sign that you are doing life wrong. He’s saying that if the one faithful Jew, the one who got it right it, the one who was the very presence of God in the world suffered too then maybe when you suffer you are closer to the heart of God than you realize.

And when Paul says that “those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers,” I don’t think he is saying that God chose a few individuals from before the foundation of the world that would be saved while the rest of us are damned. I think he is saying that the God who has known you from before you were born is the same God that has called you to this fellowship with Christ and that same God will see that fellowship through to its completion.

It is fitting that Paul ends the first half of this magnificent epistle in this way; re-imagining suffering in light of God’s love. In 1:16 Paul said “I am not ashamed of the gospel...”; a bold claim for a message with something as shameful as a crucified Messiah as its protagonist. But for the last 8 chapters Paul has been explaining to us why it is not a shameful message; namely, because in it the righteousness and love of God are revealed. The love of God revealed in the cross of Christ has turned the meaning of shame and suffering upside down. Shame and suffering have been filled with new meaning as they have been filled with God’s own self, becoming God’s own instruments of righteousness and restoration in our world. The cross, once a symbol of torture and God abandonment, has become the very sign of God’s presence for those who call Jesus “Lord.”

And in that same act of re-purposing shame and suffering, God in Christ has also reworked what it means to be holy and righteous. To put it another way, these verses about suffering are not a mere addendum tacked on to the preceding verses about holiness and new creation. Christ’s suffering gives shape to what Paul means by holiness and new creation. To be holy is to lower one’s own status for the sake of another as Christ did for us. To lean into the new creation is to subvert the power structures of the old creation by seeking the well being of those “below” us rather than the favor of those “above” us. Reaching back earlier in Paul's letter, this is what it means for the righteous to live out if faith(fullness). This is the righteousness apart from the law for which Paul has been arguing.

To live life in such a way, will surely be costly to us but, Paul argues, if all these things.... the cross, death, sin.... have not kept us from the love of Christ then indeed “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” If this is the length to which God goes to be with us then indeed “Who can bring any charge against God’s elect?” In our suffering, our weakness, our vulnerabilities, even in death, we are not defeated, abandoned, or put to shame. We are more than conquerors because the Messiah, the Son of God has suffered these things for us and suffers them with us still. When we suffer for and with others, we are ushering God's new creation into existence. 

The Spirit of Holiness

In Romans 7, Paul outlined for us by means of his own autobiography just how grave our situation is without Christ. Our circumstance is so pitiable not because we are terrible creatures bent on doing evil. We might say the situation is actually much worse than that. Paul claims that even when we are well intended and seek to do God’s will sin is so powerful that it perverts our attempts to follow God’s law. The result is that rather than adherence to the law producing righteousness and life, it actually produces injustice, sin, and death. In the language of the prophet Habakkuk, “the law is paralyzed and justice goes forth perverted.”

But that is without Christ. That is the realm of Adam’s existence. And Paul has made it clear in chapters 5 and 6 that what God has done in Jesus Christ has transferred us to a new reality in which there are new possibilities for life and righteousness. Paul reiterates this point at the very beginning of chapter 8 when he says “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus set you free from the law of sin and death.” That is, we are no longer enslaved by the law of Adam’s disobedience with the production of sin as our only option. We have now been set free for a new option; that of life, holiness, and righteousness. We have this option because God did in Jesus Christ what the law was never able to do. The law was never able to defeat sin since it did nothing to empower weak human flesh against it. God, on the other hand, sent his son in this same flesh so as to condemn sin.

Paul says that the purpose of God’s actions in all this was “in order that we might fulfill the righteous requirements of the law.” This is the very thing that Paul has been saying was so impossible without Christ! Even in following the law to the last letter, we couldn’t actually produce righteousness. But now, because of God’s actions in Jesus, we can actually fulfill the righteous requirements of the law. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that this is a poignant and concise summary of Paul’s gospel. The reason Jesus is such good news is because he provides the first real possibility of genuine righteousness in this world.

Again, much as in chapter 6, Paul reiterates that this is not all automatic. We must walk according to the Spirit if we are to truly fulfill the law. We can still decide to walk according to the flesh and, by doing so, fail to produce righteousness. But once again the emphasis in on what God has already done. Paul says in v. 9 “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit since the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

This is the real crux of the matter for Paul. If the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you (which he says it does), then that Spirit which overcame death can also overcome the power of sin. Everything hinges on this dwelling of God’s own Spirit among us. The pouring out of this resurrecting Spirit is what makes the difference between the realm of Adam and the realm of Christ.

It may be helpful here to think back to Romans 1:18-32 and remember all the nasty things that Paul said about Gentiles. Like most of his fellow Jews, Paul viewed Gentiles as hopelessly blind, entirely ignorant of the ways of God and God’s law, clueless in their  perverting the ways of God that should have been evident to them in creation. If Paul’s fellow Jews were enlightened and well-intentioned despite their inability to produce righteousness, the Gentiles couldn’t even claim that. They walked entirely in darkness without the slightest understanding of God’s law or any aim to fulfill it. It is these same clueless, hopeless, lawless Gentiles (along with his own fellows Jews) that Paul now claims can fulfill the righteous requirements of the law merely because of the Spirit’s presence in their lives! This is testament to just what a transforming power Paul understood the Holy Spirit to be in the life of 1st century Christian congregations. Anyone, even Gentiles, could fulfill the righteous requirements of the law if they walked according to the Spirit.

Holiness and righteousness are real possibilities in this life, for Jews and  Gentiles, because God’s own Spirit has made its dwelling among us. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Waiting

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...

...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or the waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for the wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.

NO!
That's not for you!

                                                                        - Oh, the Places You’ll Go

                                                                        Dr. Suess

Oh, the Places You’ll Go is probably my favorite of all the books I read with my children. I love it because it is exciting to think about all the places my children will go in their lives; the decisions they’ll make, the things they’ll do, the ways that their lives will become uniquely their own apart from me. I also like that the book points out that things don’t always go so smoothly. While it celebrates all the great things we can do with our lives, it also acknowledges that there are always set backs and difficulties along the way. “Bangups and hangups can happen to you” it says.

But there is a particular part of the book that has been prominent in my mind over this last year of our lives: the lines that I’ve quoted above. Our family has found itself in this “waiting place” for much of this past year. It started last October as we waited for Esther to be born 11 days past her due date. In November, I submitted my applications to doctoral programs and began waiting for an answer. Hints of an answer would come in February as I was accepted to one school and on the waiting list at another but the final answer would not come until April. I wish I could say that I was calm and collected during this nearly half a year, trusting that God would provide no matter the circumstance but that simply wasn’t the case. I was wracked with anxiety like few other times in my life, not only wondering whether I would get in anywhere but wondering where we might be moving our family if we moved at all.

But that waiting already seems a distant memory because of what has happened since. It is difficult to even remember just how stressful that time was because the months that followed were a whole new level of stress and anxiety. On May 26, my dad suffered a stroke. The next three weeks were filled with waiting and wondering; waiting to see how long it would take my dad to recover, how much he might recover, or if he would recover at all. One day would bring reports of improvement, the next day reports of concern. Every day there was nothing to do but wait; wait to see if the swelling in his brain would go down, wait to see if his cognition improved, wait to see if he could swallow food. On June 14, the waiting ended as my dad entered his eternal rest.

The day after my dad’s funeral, my mom called to tell me that my grandmother, my only living grandparent and the only one I had known into my adult life, had been taken to the hospital. So now we would wait for the results of her tests. A week later we found out that she had stage 4 cancer in several organs and that she had a couple weeks to a couple of months to live. So we waited. We let her know that we loved her in all the ways we could and we waited for the inevitable. On August 4, my grandmother’s waiting ended.

In the time between my dad’s and grandmother’s deaths, we relocated our family from Illinois to Massachusetts so that I could begin my ThD program at BU. This brought its own forms of waiting; waiting to settle into a routine after uprooting our children from the only home they have ever known, waiting to get over the continuous string of illnesses that has come from being in a new place, waiting for the grief from too many losses too close together to become anything other than numbness and exhaustion.

And the waiting continues even now over a year since it all began. We are still waiting on our house in Illinois to sell. We are still waiting to get into our own home here. We are waiting to see if Jess will eventually have a full time teaching job. We are waiting for some order to emerge from the chaos.

All of this waiting has made me keenly aware of just how little waiting I’ve done in my life. We live in a culture that does its best to eliminate waiting from our lives.  The fast food drive thru, every searchable fact available at lightning speed in the palm of our hand, and stores open on Thanksgiving Day already decorated for Christmas have conditioned us to expect that anything worth having ought to be available simultaneous with the moment our desire arises. Generally speaking, we are not a people accustomed to waiting. Given the opportunity, we will eliminate all the waiting we possibly can from our lives because, as Dr. Seuss says, the waiting place is “a most useless place.” Time spent waiting, we often think, is time wasted. Time we could have spent doing something more enjoyable or more important.

I think we often carry this same view over into our thoughts about God and God’s work in our lives. God has a plan for each one of us, we proclaim, and our task is to get in line with that plan as quickly and smoothly as possible. We have an “Oh, the Places You’ll Go with God” theology. God wants to do great and exciting things in your life. And sure, there will be set backs along the way. That happens to all of us. But don’t get stuck too long because time spent waiting is time wasted; time you could have spent getting on with God’s plan for your life.

It is no wonder then that we have great difficulty with Advent; a season defined by waiting. For four weeks leading up to Christmas, the Church says “Wait”. Right at the time when our culture is working itself into its annual holiday frenzy of shopping, scheduling, and socializing, the Church asks us to remember what it means to wait. We remember Israel’s centuries long waiting for its Messiah. We remember that we are waiting for the world to be set right. For one month every year, our task is not to do or accomplish or follow a plan but only to wait.

In fact, the Church’s year begins here. Advent is the first season of the Christian calendar. Waiting is not one stance among others for us. It is our first stance. It is where our worship begins. Before Christ is born at Christmas, before his kingdom is proclaimed in Epiphany, before the journey to the cross in Lent, before the new life of Easter and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, before all of it, the very first movement of the Church’s life every year is to take up a posture of waiting. It may well be that centuries of Christian wisdom found that this posture was the one in which we could most readily come to know the savior celebrated in all the other seasons. The Church calendar, patterned as it is after the life of Christ, easily could have started with Jesus’ birth at Christmas. Instead, we confess that in order for the story of Christ to be properly told and lived it must begin with a season of waiting. Rather than counting time spent waiting as time wasted, the Church confesses that time spent waiting is essential to truly seeing and knowing Jesus.

This is what I wish to confess as well. This year of waiting for various things has caused me to see Jesus more clearly. And that clearer vision is of a Jesus who waits with us; whose priority isn’t as much plans and proper decisions, as it is presence.

I’ve been reminded in all these times of waiting that we wait for those we love. The times when we have a choice in the matter, we choose to wait for those about whom we care. We wait in a hospital room with those who are dying because simply being with them is more important than anything else we could be doing. We wait to start a meal until everyone is present because eating with those we love is as important as eating. We wait for marriage because the health of our relationship with this one person is more important than gratifying our sexual desires. When we wait for someone, we are saying that their presence is more important than whatever else we might be doing at that moment or whatever else we might get from them. In relationships of love, presence takes precedence over plans.

I imagine that it is not so different in our relationship with God. Karl Barth wrote that “The will of God is Jesus Christ.” I’m not certain about everything that Barth meant by that sentence but it at least might suggest that God’s will for our lives isn’t so much a plan as a person. What God wills more than anything else is not that we accomplish certain things or go certain places in life or make exactly the right decisions. God’s will for us is Jesus; that in Jesus we will know the presence of God in our very own flesh.

I think of all the people I know who are waiting or have waited for something for so long. Friends who have waited to have children. Who are waiting for a job. Waiting for an opportunity. Who are waiting for healing. Who are waiting for an inevitable death. Who are waiting for that special someone. Some who are waiting for purpose or direction. Some who are waiting for justice. Some who are waiting for some wholeness and peace. Just waiting for some order to emerge from the chaos. It seems like everyone close to me is waiting for something.

I’d be the last person to say that all our waiting will work out just fine in the end. It doesn’t always. I won’t say that the waiting isn’t painful, sometimes agonizing. We may very well plead with God to bring our waiting to an end. Jess and I have done just that many times over. Given the chance, we would have happily traded in all of our waiting many months ago before the worst of it had even began. But I will say that all our waiting and pleading is not in vain. It is not time wasted, whatever the outcome, if in our waiting we aim to encounter Jesus. For, as Pope Francis recently said, “The Lord does not disappoint those who take this risk; whenever we take a step towards Jesus, we come to realize that he is already there, waiting for us with open arms." 

May your season of waiting, whether it be these four weeks of Advent or a much longer time than that, be one in which you encounter a savior who is with us in all our waiting and who waits for you with open arms.