Today, I’m writing from a hospital waiting room.

I’m here because, well, we’re waiting.

We’re waiting on a door to open, and to hear the person who opens the door call the name of the person we’re waiting with.

That door has opened a few times already, but we haven’t heard the right name yet.

Wait. It’s opening, the lady is checking a chart, and there it is. A quick prayer, some “I love yous,” and now … we wait.

We’ve chosen not to wait in the same waiting room. Instead, we’re a few miles down the road now in a different kind of waiting room, one that makes you forget that you’re waiting. Eating a scone or coffee cake surrounded by people networking while sipping coffee is a great way to wait.

Why can’t hospital waiting rooms be more like coffee shops? I think it’s because not all waiting is the same. Here, in one of the coolest coffee shops I’ve ever been in (if you’re ever in the Irmo, SC, area, you’ve got to visit Loveland Coffee), people are waiting for friends, for a coffee drink, or, as is the case for The B99, for the Wi-Fi connection to work. It’s the kind of waiting that can produce expectation, anticipation, and frustration (from the Wi-Fi, not the coffee or friends).

But at the hospital we just left, the waiting is difference, and it produces something different: desperation. Depending on the results people are waiting for, that desperation can turn into devastation or exhilaration.

I guess that’s why hospital waiting rooms wouldn’t work as coffee shops. You don’t invite friends over to chat while you wait for something that weighty. Don’t misunderstand me. We all need friends to wait with us, but the weightier the waiting, the smaller that number grows, and occasionally, that number is you, a few others, and the only One who can fill a waiting room with peace.

Is this why we don’t like to talk about these things? Why so many preachers would rather spend 5 hours shooting the perfect YouTube video than spend 5 minutes sitting in silence with people whose minds are screaming at them?

“Can I afford this?”

“Am I pregnant?”

“Is it cancer?”

“What if it’s inoperable?”

We like our lives nice and clean, don’t we? No blurred lines or unanswerable questions, and if waiting always produced those black and white answers, maybe we’d be better at it. But so many times, as is the case for us today, we’re just waiting to be tested so we can wait to get answers.

Tests and answers. Excuse me while I have a high-school math class flashback.

Even as I type, I feel the weightiness of it all, and I’m not even the one waiting to be tested. But I have been before, and I will be again, and it always comes back to the waiting. I wish I were better at it. I wish there was a way to get better at it without having to actually do it. But waiting is what teaches us to wait better, whether the waiting is about us, or with others.

Waiting is common, exhausting, and hard. But if we look past what is too easily seen in order to focus on what is too often missed, we’ll find that waiting brings an uncommon strength from an unexpected source. Jesus, the Lord Himself, meets us in these places and gives us more than the answers we want; He gives us the power we need.

Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth does not become weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable. He gives strength to the weary, and to him who lacks might He increases power. Though youths grow weary and tired, and vigorous young men stumble badly, yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary. (Isaiah‬ ‭40‬:‭28‬-‭31‬, emphasis mine)

Now that, friends, is worth the waiting.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This morning I had the awesome opportunity to waste spend a couple hours of my life in traffic court because my tags had expired a couple decades ago (decades, months, what’s the difference, right?) and I didn’t know about it until a local police officer pulled me over last month to tell me. Anyway, as I sat in court, I watched people a lot and thought about what I was seeing and experiencing and I wondered how it all relates to Jesus and His church.

Here’s some of what I learned:

1. Traffic court isn’t fun. There aren’t any people dressed as clowns making balloon animals and dancing around to fast-paced music. I kept wondering if possibly this is how most people see the church. Probably. And since we’re all about trying to make people want to come to church, we often go to great lengths to make church fun. And the longer I sat in traffic court, the more I realized that maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. It’s not the most important thing (like many of us in ministry mistakingly think it is), but I felt bad for the people who just sat there staring blankly at the heads in front of them and found myself wanting to help lighten the mood. But I had no balloons, and so I just sat there and stared, too.

2. Traffic court isn’t easy to understand. In fact, it took me awhile to actually find it because there weren’t many clear signs. If I hadn’t seen the long line of people each asking the person in front of them if they were in the line for traffic court, I’d still be wandering the halls of the courthouse. And then, once you’re inside, there isn’t a lot of help. If the sign in table is blocked by people, you wouldn’t know to sign in, and there aren’t helpful people directing you where you need to go. It made me thankful for the awesome folks that wear brightly colored orange shirts at The Gathering every Sunday so that first time guests don’t have to wonder. Clear signs and simple instructions go a long way, too.

3. Traffic court isn’t relevant. Well, at least not until they finally call your name, and at that point it’s very relevant for about a minute. But for two or three hours, nothing that happens in that courtroom has anything to do with you. I don’t golf much (because I suck at it), but when I do, I’m usually good for one or two nice shots each round. Those shots make me want to play again – eventually – but if I hit more good shots, I think I’d play a lot more. Maybe people don’t come to our churches because too much time passes between the really good, relevant moments. We should try hard to have more of those because there’s nothing worse than sitting through an hour and a half of irrelevant, confusing stuff just to get 30 seconds of relevancy.

4. Traffic court is all about waiting. This may be the biggest thing I learned during my two hour visit to purgatory, and so this is where I really want you to hang out with me for a few minutes. The lesson I learned was a hard one, and it has everything to do with a scary trend in the American Church.

See, all the things I mentioned in numbers 1-3 are things that we can do something about, and so often we do. Churches spends tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars annually trying to make church more fun, more clear and more relevant. We fly to conferences and pay more money in the hope that some of their creativity will rub off on us, even if we don’t have a creative bone in our bodies. I’m not writing this to say we should or shouldn’t. I am writing this to make the following statement:

We can’t do anything about the wait. Nothing. Not. A. Thing.

As I sat there surrounded by others who were just sitting there, I noticed how restless so many people were. Their legs bounced up and down. Their faces got red when they thought someone had been helped before they should have been. They started looking around the room as if they could somehow burn a door that they could escape through. And then, it happened. A clerk stood up and announced that if anyone wanted a continuance, they should line up by the window, and half the room stood up and moved!

That line started moving, and for a moment I really wanted to get a continuance, too. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to come back to traffic court another day as much as I was just tired of being in a place that wasn’t fun, wasn’t clear and wasn’t relevant. Can you relate?

But then it dawned on me what was really happening. As these people got their new court date and started walking out, they were smiling, sure, but they weren’t done. They still had to come back…again. They’d still have to wait…again. They seemed like they were free, like they were able to “get on with their lives,” but in reality their lives were still stuck in traffic court. In fact, these people had made the worst decision possible: they had quit waiting after already having waited up to an hour and a half. That’s like waiting for a roller coaster and then dropping out of line just as you reach the ride.

The shame of it all is that American Christianity isn’t that much different, is it? We grow tired of the wait, and we seek a continuance. We try something new so we feel good again, or read the newest book with the biggest smile on the cover, or convince ourselves that God really wouldn’t ever ask his children to endure long waits and mundane days.

Umm, have you read the Bible? Sometimes, the wait is exactly what God wants for his children. In fact, it’s in the waiting that not only we grow, but our view of God grows, too. To his children waiting in exile and captivity (a little worse than traffic court, but not by much), he spoke through Isaiah the prophet and said,

Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him! (Isaiah 30:18) (emphasis added)

We try so hard to get out of the things that God puts us in, and ultimately it dooms us to a cycle of waiting until we’re too frustrated to wait anymore, then asking for and getting a continuance, and then finding ourselves repeating the same cycle again somewhere down the road. No wonder so many in the American church feel like they’re stuck. Could it be that what we’ve totally misunderstood what it means to be free?

I learned something important today in traffic court: freedom doesn’t mean we never have to wait as much as we never have to worry about waiting.

It wasn’t long after the mass exodus that my name was called and I took care of business. As I was walking out of the courthouse, a lady came up behind me, told me she’d gotten her case continued and asked if I’d gotten my continuance.

“No,” I told her. “I’m done.”

She let out a long, slow sigh and simply said, “Oh.” It was the sound of someone who suddenly realized that just a little more waiting would have been the difference between feeling free and actually being free.

Don’t give up now. Not when you’re so much closer to a gracious God who is rising to show you compassion and to bring you justice. It won’t be much longer before you’ll hear him calling your name.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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?