Waiting. Waiting is the lens through which I see the world these days. It is quite disorienting for someone who has been committed daily to a goal that has driven the last ten years of my life. Since I started study to complete my undergraduate degree in the fall of 1997, working, studying, sleeping, eating was all of life. Conversations with friends, movies, travel hardly existed. I became so disciplined at my monastic existence that I almost forgot what people do with leisure time. So the time I spent traveling this summer, visiting friends, seeing parts of the US and Central America, studying Spanish again felt like a well-earned rest. But even my rest was a carefully mapped-out adventure with just enough time to indulge in the various pleasures which had been sacrificed to my vocational call to prepare for ministry.
In September, all that changed. I have been fully engaged in waiting. I am waiting for a congregation to choose me as its pastor – the work for which I have now been trained and the work for which I have been longing since I recognized a call to ministry in the early 1990’s. Day by day I swing between wanting to make my peace with waiting and wanting to stir up more possibilities for pastoral work. The former feels like sitting on hold, my love and gifts for ministry idle and wasted. The latter is frustrating, pushing for something that just doesn’t happen, all my hopes raised at every opportunity, only to be dashed when things don’t pan out. “How long, O Lord, how long?” The Psalmist cries, asking God to wake up to the tragedies of the people who trust that God will answer their prayers because they are God’s beloved. Those words often mirror my own impatience, my need for God to answer me.
Lately a quieter voice enters my prayers. It is a voice that calls me to open my heart to the gifts of this time of waiting. What if the confusion of this time is of my own making? What if it is a struggle between what I want to see and what already exists for me? So I have decided it is time to accept the invitation back to Biloxi, Mississippi, where there is ministry to a community still suffering the effects of the biggest storm ever experienced on the Gulf Coast. I spent a week there this summer working as a chaplain in the medical clinic and washing the towels for 100 volunteers working to rebuild homes. I don’t know exactly what my days will be like or what my duties will entail or even how long I will be needed. Right now, all I know is that having a chance to use my gifts of ministry is a gift to me, an answer to my longing.
The Apostle Paul says that the whole creation waits with eager longing, groaning in expectation for the full revealing of God’s redemption. I know that I am not the only one who waits. In this season of Advent we all enter a time of waiting, of looking more deeply at our longings. Where is God at work that we have not noticed? What is the gift that waiting with openness can bring to each of us and to our community? What adventure awaits?
It has been so wonderful to be with you again these last few months. Grace is home, my solid ground. I will miss you all, but know that we are together in our work in God’s service. May God continue to bless you.
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How funny that after weeks of not checking your blog regularly, I would choose to check in a day or two after you update with this letter to Grace.
Surely God is in the waiting, and surely you are just the person needed to engage in this ministry in Biloxi. Perhaps it can be considered a call of its own (whoever said congregations are the only places through which the Spirit can call somebody?). You are in my prayers, sister.
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