By the time President Obama stood at the podium in the White House and said, “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,” the American people and the world already knew. In fact, they’d already been chanting “USA! USA!” at the Phillies-Mets game in Philadelphia for quite some time and doing the same in front of the White House where Obama finally made it “official.” The first cryptic Tweet about the end of Bin Laden had been chirped out at 7:25 pm and by the time Geraldo said, “We’re being told the President will speak in less than 2 minutes” for the last time and the speech actually happened, Twitter was seeing as many as 4,000 Tweets per second about the news.
Apparently, good news travels fast, even when it doesn’t.
It took over an hour for Obama to finally tell us what we already knew (which says a lot about how social media has impacted the delivery of news in our culture, but that’s for another post), and as I watched the Facebook and Twitter feeds, it struck me that what we do while we wait for the “official” announcement says a lot about us.
In that hour, Americans texted their little thumbs to death. At one point the stands at the baseball game mentioned above turned into a sea of bowed heads as the crowd became more interested in the news feeds on their mobile devices than the game that they had paid to attend. News channels had put talking heads in front of the cameras and told them to stretch out what they had until the speech started. For at least one hour, not one person said the words “royal” and “wedding.” When I got up to go to bed, the B99 asked me what I was doing, and when I told her, she looked at me like I was crazy. Why wouldn’t I want to hear the President announce the death of Bin Laden? I sat back down and, like most of you, waited.
As I sat there, I wondered if Geraldo’s mustache was actually growing in real-time on live television. I wondered if the President’s announcement would seem a little anti-climatic since everyone already knew what he was going to say. And the longer we waited, the more I actually wondered if some DNA tester was looking at the President and saying, “Nope. It’s not him. Sorry.” I mean, why the delay if the news was so good?
Isn’t that the rub? When news is good, waiting seems unnecessary, almost cruel. But if we really believe that what we’re waiting for is, in fact, good news, then the waiting simply increases the watching. We sit and watch talking heads. We postpone sleep. We hit refresh over and over and over again to see the latest feeds. We stare at a TV screen showing a long, carpeted hall and look for the first hint of a shadow, a shoe, a leg. We watch for movement, and when we finally see him coming, we turn up the volume even though it’s already loud enough, and we listen.
The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)
As great as the announcement was last night for our country and the world, there is a far greater announcement coming. At times it can seem as if the good news is riding a turtle, and yet the important question is, what are we doing while we wait for the “official” announcement signaling the end of a far greater war in the unseen realm? If we truly believe it to be good news, 2 things will increase: our watching and our telling. Like the Twitter explosion last night, we’ll find ourselves relentlessly telling anyone who will listen about the victory that is ours, and about how much our King desires it to be theirs, too. And we’ll watch. We’ll find our attention constantly turning toward that day, as we stare at a world full of signs pointing down the long hallway of time, watching for a shadow, a movement, any sign of His return. He will come, and He will bring with Him good news.
What are you doing while you wait?
