Pandemic restrictions are not fear; they are faith

One of the best blessings of being a dad is how the Spirit teaches me at the exact same time that I teach my son.

He is eight years old. Anyone who raised kids knows how they want what they want and they want it now.

It’s no use telling a little kid to “be patient.” Kids don’t “come out of the box” with patience already in their “operating systems.”

Patience comes with years and years of having no choice but to wait.

One of the things I hear myself say to my son at least once or twice a week is: “Son, life is all about waiting. As long as you live, you’re going to be waiting for something. You might as well learn how to enjoy it.”

The first time I heard myself say that, I knew it wasn’t just for my son. The Spirit was saying it to me, too.

Life is waiting.

I cannot think of any time in my life that I wasn’t waiting for something. What about you?

Some kinds of waiting are much harder than others.

But the Spirit’s wisdom is the same: Life is all about waiting. You might as well learn to enjoy it.

The other thing that I’m trying to teach my son is how waiting can be such a gift. It can even be a joy.

He would watch Christmas movies all year long if I let him. But I make him wait until after Thanksgiving. Why? Because I want him to learn that anticipation is as big a part of the joy as having what you anticipate.

The weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving are the weeks when his anticipation of the Christmas season will build and build. How much better will that first Christmas movie be on Thanksgiving night because he waited for it?

I want him to know that some things in life are just so much better when they come at the end of a long wait.

People who want to believe in God have always found him to be too slow. From cover to cover, the Bible always has God making people wait and wait and wait.

If God lives beyond space and time, who could blame him for not keeping to our tight human schedules?

But I don’t think God’s poor sense of timing has anything to do with infinity getting lost in its translation to space and time.

Maybe God knows that waiting is good for us.

That having is just not complete unless the waiting comes first.

Waiting with God is good, life-giving, and sacred.

We could look at this pandemic as a curse that is forcing us to wait to “get our lives back.”

But our lives are here and now in the pandemic. We are living even while we are waiting! This is our life right now.

And if life is a gift from God, then even life in a pandemic is a gift.

Even waiting out a pandemic is sacred.

So we better enjoy it and give thanks.

But while we live in the waiting, we can be sure that the waiting is bringing something to life.

If God makes his people wait, he makes them wait for a reason. The waiting is gestating, the process in which a baby–a new life–grows in the womb.

If we have faith, we know that we’re not waiting “to get our lives back”; we’re waiting for God to give us our new lives!

I don’t believe that God made this pandemic; but I do believe that God is sanctifying it and turning it into part of his story of making all things new.

If we choose to believe that God is sanctifying this pandemic, then we choose to believe that God is making something new while we wait it out.

We could try to get back to “life the way it was before,” but why do that when God is surely making a new life that is better than life has ever been?

This holiday season, many of us will choose to miss the people and the things that make the holidays feel like the holidays. We will choose to wait out the pandemic alone in our homes.

Some people say that we are giving in to fear.

I say that we are not giving into fear; we are giving ourselves to God who is with us in the waiting.

We are sad, but we are also full of hope, joy, and peace.

We have faith that the God who makes us wait is the God who is also making something that will be worth the wait.

We have faith that what comes out of this pandemic will be better than what we took into it.

We have this faith because we know our God and what he loves to do with a chuckle on his lips and a twinkle in his eye. He will make us wait, but the waiting is all part of the gift.

So, as I say to my son: Take heart. Waiting is life. And whatever God is growing in all of this will be worth the wait when it comes!

Grace and peace.