Waiting

Many of you are aware that my daughter, Cecelia, is a senior in High School, currently knee-deep in the college application process and days away from celebrating her eighteenth birthday. It has been decades since I was in her position, and the teen world today feels light years away from my reality at her age.

As she has contemplated her future over the past two years, we’ve had many conversations about what is to come, and I’ve had the pleasure of watching her navigate the unwritten rules of how to position herself to launch into adulthood. I have watched her mature during this long period of waiting… waiting… waiting. I have watched her learn the direction in which she will point her sails next year.

Make no mistake; being seventeen and wondering about one’s destiny is not to be equated in any way with the actual trials Jesus faced during the events we remember in Lent. Even a whiff of a suggestion of this feels heretical to me. Cecelia and I have reminded ourselves that the chapters she writes over these next several months are not capitalized or underlined in her autobiography. Her greater timeline is not about her, but about her place in helping others in the world, and she is well aware of the many advantages she has, through accident of birth, which makes the waiting a minor issue, and which highlights privilege – sometimes uncomfortably – in this country and in the world.

It has been a few weeks since I wrote the first draft of this Lenten blog entry. I like to “age” my writing, reading it later, with the hope that another look later on will be worth two “looks” right away. This particular time away from the draft was a time of profound and serious “firsts” in our country, punctuated by waiting that is infinitely more dire than waiting for a virtual “fat” envelope to arrive.

Since I first wrote this blog, I have waited five days in a room, separated from my family, until a person connected to my school community was able to be tested and confirmed negative for COVID-19. Our family has waited with the rest of the world for news from around the globe detailing the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. We have waited to find out which activities will be canceled, waited to find out when our schools will be closed, and waited and wondered about our lives in the near future. I still wait for the time when I can collect all of my third graders under one roof again and see my extended family face-to-face. Our disappointments, however, seem trivial in the face of the hospital scenes described on the news. We continue to wait in suspended animation, holding our collective breath.

For all of these reasons, I have come to view Lent differently this year. I think about Jesus, who knew His fate, and I wonder what he thought about during His time of waiting between Palm Sunday and Easter. Think about Mary, at Jesus’ feet as he was crucified, and I wonder how she made sense of her place in the terrible events unfolding before her. I think of the Disciples, falling asleep in the Garden as they waited. There is so much waiting in Lent. Holy waiting. Painful waiting. Waiting that this year is highlighted for me.

The Good News of Easter is a reminder to everyone who waits in this life that we are not alone as we wait. While waiting for medical test results, God is there. While waiting for physical or emotional healing, God is there. While waiting for the next footfall in life’s journey, God is there. Even if we cannot hear His footsteps, if we drown them out with our own preoccupied din, or if we look for – but cannot find – His footprints, God is with us.

Sometimes we may want to wait alone and we do not want to discuss with others where we are about to go in our lives, or from what precipice we strive not to fall. While we are allowed to have that privacy, let us not also push away God, who will sustain us all of our lives.

-Kristin Murphy