...wait

Silently now I wait for Thee,

Ready, my God, Thy will to see;

Open my heart, illumine me, Spirit divine!

--Clara H. Scott, 1895

Wait.                                    Wait.                                    Wait.                                    How hard is that for you? For me, and for most of us, waiting is nigh to impossible. While waiting for no discernible reason is infuriating, we are not even very good at waiting for reasons we comprehend and support. Good things may come to those who wait, but instant gratification comes to those who grab.

But our impatience is not just annoying to those around us (mothers and teachers, can I get an ‘Amen’?). It can also cheat us of the reward of hearing --- really hearing ---what someone has to say. Wait to see what God has to say; it may not be spoken on your time, but on God’s. Sit with  silence; sit in expectation. Don’t miss the message because of your impatience.

Wait.                                    Wait.                                    Wait.

...I am, you are

We are called to be God’s prophets, speaking for the truth and right,

Standing firm for godly justice, bringing evil into light.

Let us seek the courage needed, our high calling to fulfill,

That we all may know the blessing of the doing of God’s will.

---Thomas A. Jackson, 1973

Prophet. When I see the word, my mind goes to oracles, seers, fortune-tellers, or at least future-tellers. Some guy dressed in outrageous rags with a more outrageous hair-do, straight up giving the king the business. Same dude, few days later, found tossed off the city heights or ripped limb from limb ‘under mysterious circumstances’. Is that your mental image, too? This does not sound like a highly sought-after gig, my people. 

In actuality, the word means something less spectacular, and more applicable to our lives today. A prophet is one who speaks a fresh word from God for the world. You see my meaning? We could all be called to be prophets, listening to the guidance of God as we share a fresh message of hope to the world. We could be the ones called to envision and embody the reign of Christ in the world. We could be the ones called to speak hope to despair. Strength to fear. Love to apathy. Welcome to mistrust. Plenty to scarcity.  Sound daunting? It does to me, too. But our help and courage comes from our close relatedness to Jesus and his message.

Prophets. I am, and you are. All of us are called. And family…we have these voices for a reason.

...illuminated in your presence

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;

naught be all else to me, save that thou art:

thou my best thought, by day or by night,

waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

---trad. Irish

“The room lit up when she walked in.” You can picture it—I bet you can—from a scene in a movie, or maybe even from a lucky moment in real life. That moment, the rare one, when the stir of the cocktail party crowd stills, the sea of tuxedoed and pearl necklaced extras parts, and the one glides across the room, lighting her own path, a hundred eyes following her. You can tell from the glow that she is the leading lady. You’ve probably experienced this effect irl (in real life) as well—the way some people seem to light up a room with their very presence, making everyone else around them lighter, too. We’re like moths, in those moments, drawn to that light.

In this beloved Irish hymn, the text speaks of God metaphorically. Among those metaphors is God’s presence as light. Not that God brings light, or that knowing God creates light, or that God helps us see light, although all of those may be true and are undoubtedly good. No, in this text, God’s presence is, itself, light. When God is my light, what is illuminated in my life? Things I had yet to notice, gifts or strengths yet to be exercised? Hurts and fears I had hidden away, in the dark, even from myself? Is, perhaps, the full beauty of my being illuminated in the presence of God, expressed as light?

If my life lights up when God walks in…what then?

...beside the weary road

All ye, beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low,

who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow,

look now! for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing;

O rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.

---Edmund H. Sears, 1849

This unfamiliar verse of the very familiar carol "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" has always drawn my soul. We all read our lives into the songs we sing, I think, and I read mine into this verse. I have felt that it speaks to anyone dealing with a chronic condition, toiling sometimes ‘with painful steps and slow'. This season, I feel it speaks to many, many of us, burdened with cares and sorrows beyond our comprehension. Who of us does not now and again feel crushed, stooped, weary of the pain of being human in a world full of humans?

But look! Ahead of us shine hours of ease and gladness, golden in their comfort. I know, I know…some who know me may be saying, right about now, that it is not like me to talk about ‘pie in the sky, by and by’, and you would be right. Stay with me. The genius in this verse, and in the grace offered us, is that the angels don't come like shiny aliens and whisk us away to a world where nothing matters anymore. No, the angels' song fills the skies over the weary road. Picture yourself, and me, all of us, laid out on the hoods of our cars, wrapped in fleece blankets against the winter chill; and there, because we happen to be travelers on this weary road, we hear angels. Because life has led us here, where we are, how we are, dealing with what we must, we hear the angels sing.

Wouldn't miss it for the world.