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"Waiting Rooms"
I Thessalonians 5:16-24
December 12, 1999
David Beckett, D.Min
I used to be the world's worst line-waiters! I say "used to be" only because God is teaching me to be patient as I become older. Now I am only ONE of the world's worst line-waiters. Perhaps I am joined by the likes of you. Is there any more annoying, exasperating experience than being at the wrong end of an endless line of humanity? Of course, the slowest and most frustrating lines occur at all our favorite places. If you slip on the ice and hear a sickening crunch as you and, you will likely find yourself in the emergency room which looks a lot like K-Mart during Dollar Days. Squalling babies, bleeding do-it-yourselfers, frightened wheezing great-grandfathers, all of them in desperate need -- and all of them ahead of you and your throbbing injury. Everyone there feels awful, and everyone there resents having to wait in line for medical attention. No wonder the mood of the place can be snappish and snarling. I came across some actual 911 calls to the Los Angeles Fire Department to which emergency crews were dispatched in 1989. How would you like to end up in the emergency waiting room with some of these poor folks?
1. Person has arm stuck in ATM machine.
2. 18-year-old male can't get any rest at home ... wants ride to the hospital.
3. 13-year-old stubbed her toe on stereo speaker.
4. 61-year-old worried because her stomach is not growling.
5. Lady has headache for four days. Husband has no money for aspirin.
6. Person answered no to question, "Are you conscious?"
7. Lady has blisters on her feet from walking for three days at the Taco Bell.
8. Bee stuck in child's nostril.
9. Daughter says mom is acting weird.
10. Man was shot two months ago. Now he feels dizzy and is worried about bullet.
11. Man shot one year ago -- says the bullet and his intestines are coming out now.
12. Out of breath from running from the police.
13. Person has been hiccupping for four days.
Other infamous waiting rooms include that horrendous line you face at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Or have you ever had the pleasure of going to the unemployment office? In addition to suffering the depression that comes with joblessness, you get to endure hours in a humiliating line-up, just to get the chance to prove you really are still out of work.
Last June I was in Ohio with our Soldotna senior high youth on a mission trip. In one store they have checkout lines with no human cashiers! You simply take your items and scan them yourself and pay by credit card! Amazing! Fax machines, microwaves, overnight deliveries, express check-out lanes, e-commerce -- all these modern conveniences testify to the fact that we all hate to wait -- for anything. We have so many demands on our time, so many things going on that we consider any time spent waiting as time hopelessly lost.
This week's epistle texts give a different perspective on waiting rooms. Paul's counsel to the Thessalonians insists that every moment of a life lived with the Holy Spirit is filled with promise and possibility. Be joyful! Be prayerful! Be thankful! -- no matter what the circumstances. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that this attitude was one Jesus himself embodied and intended for all his disciples. Jesus took advantage of every circumstance to demonstrate God's love and presence....Sabbath day wanderings in grainfields, fruitless fishing expeditions, time spent waiting by a Samaritan well, the hours before his arrest and execution -- all were times equally ripe for God to use him as a messenger proclaiming the Good News.
Jesus didn't know any waiting rooms -- he knew only living rooms. While we might complain that we spend a lot of our time living in waiting rooms, Jesus spent his ministry waiting in living rooms. He stood in the midst of the routine events of everyday life that kept first-century men and women as busy and pressed for time as us in 1999. Jesus hung around with Martha and Mary while they cooked and cleaned, he arrived early for dinner parties and stayed late, he walked in the midst of crowds when he might have ridden or sailed to his destinations. Living in waiting rooms.
Novelist and Southern writer Walker Percy, who lived all his life in Louisiana, died in 1990. He came from an extremely dysfunctional family -- many of his closest family members committed suicide. After being raised by a cousin, Percy attended the University of North Carolina. In 1937, he entered Columbia University for a medical degree. A year after he had taken his degree, at the age of 26, and while working as an intern at Bellvue Hospital in New York City, he contracted TB from a cadaver. This sent him into an extended period of recuperation, forcing him, in his words, to "not so much change my life as give me leave to change it". While he was recovering, Percy read extensively from Dostoevski, Thomas Mann, Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard. By the time he was 30, after four years in this medically-imposed "waiting room," Walker Percy knew what he would do with his life: He would become a writer. For Percy, a waiting room became a discovery room: discovery of himself, and discovery that the claims of science are not the only valid methods of acquiring knowledge about the world.
Paul urged the unity of "spirit and soul and body" to the Thessalonians while they waited for the return of Christ. When we spend every waking moment attending only to the business of business, we ignore spiritual needs. By putting off prayer until Sunday morning, confining thankfulness to a quick grace before meals, squeezing joy into the few weeks of the Christmas season, we confine faithfulness to a waiting room.
Advent is a "waiting room" itself -- a time of preparing once more for the birth of Christ in our midst. Consider all the waiting room lines you might find yourself in during the next two weeks. At cash registers, gift-wrap departments, cruising for that last parking space at the mall, in line at the ATM -- all are opportunities to feel frustration or to feel joy, to offer up prayers or snarl out curses, to be thankful for all you have or feel envy for what is beyond your reach.
Last Monday while I was waiting in a checkout line at Fred Meyer an older gentleman in front of me was fumbling through his wallet. “Well, looky here! How did this get here?” He turned and showed me his discovery. It was a card that looked like one from a Monopoly game. It read, “Get out of hell free.” We laughed and I told him, “I should have that card. I’m a preacher.”
When I see those of you with babies and toddlers I have sympathy for the chaos that accompanies them. At one point in our family we had three children in diapers! One day I found myself waiting in a checkout line to purchase two two liter bottles of soda. My mind was wandering as I waited. Then I was suddenly aware of a gentle movement in my body, a swaying back and forth. I was cradling the two bottles of pop like babies and was rocking them back and forth...back and forth. I quickly looked around and was grateful that no one seemed to notice my gentle care of two bottles of pop!
If we have eyes to see, tremendous gifts are available to us during waiting times. Waiting rooms can become windows into the eternal. Here is Frank Laubach's discovery of a sacred place: "Are you building sacred palaces for yourself? I meant to write 'places' to be sure, but I think I shall leave the word 'palaces' for that is what any house becomes when it is sacred. The most important discovery of my whole life is that one can take a little rough cabin and transform it into a palace just by flooding it with thoughts of God. When one has spent many months in a little house like this in daily thoughts about God, the very entering of the house, the very sight of it as one approaches, starts associations which set the heart tingling and the mind flowing. I have come to the point where I must have my house in order to write the best letters or think the richest thoughts. So in this sense one man after the other builds his own heaven or his hell. It does not matter where one is, one can at once begin to build heaven, by thoughts which one thinks while in that place ... I have learned the secret of heaven-building --anywhere."
Do you think it is possible that our homes could become the kind of sacred places Frank Laubach describes? Could our living rooms or dining rooms become holy places where God is experienced? What about K-Mart, or Walmart, or Sears, or Old Navy? As we walk into these and other stores this season is it possible that we might breathe a prayer to God to help us see this store as a sacred place? Don’t you think we could offer gentle smiles to those who wait in line with us? Couldn’t we look at our checkout person and catch a glimpse of the presence of God?
Let's use Advent as John the Baptist did, to prepare the world for Christ's arrival. In all the waiting rooms you find yourself in this Advent season, try feeling not just the warm, fuzzy glow of the "Christmas spirit" but the life-altering power of possibilities available through the Holy Spirit. Waiting is a part of human life. We know about waiting. We wait for Christmas. We wait in line. We wait. Waiting is a reality we cannot control. How we wait is within our control. It is your choice and mine. And how we wait makes all the difference on that day when the waiting is over. |
December 12, 1999
