Patience…who loves to practice patience? Who loves to wait and hope? Who loves to watch the clock? In our world we wait for very little. Our phones give us answers in seconds, our TV’s allow us to skip commercials, and stores have self check-out lines – no waiting! But, we, as followers of Jesus are called to wait and to remember during the Lenten season, just as Jesus’ disciples were waiting for their Messiah. When he came down the mountain from his transfiguration experience, his followers were waiting on him. They were disappointed, disillusioned, and distraught when he told them of his plans. They did not understand the direction in which he was heading. They had their own plans of healing and teaching but Jesus had bigger plans. And, are we not unlike the disciples, with our own agendas? We have a difficult time waiting on Jesus. And, often, we do not agree with his plans. We fail to remember his promises.
One of my favorite writers is theologian Frederick Buechner. He speaks of patience and remembering in his book, A Room Called Remember.
“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts…We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need – not all the time, surely, but from time to time – to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember – the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
-Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
As Paul encourages those in Thessalonica he says, “encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone (1 Thessalonians 5:13). As children of the light we are called to wait…wait for our children to tie their shoes, wait for our elderly family members to tell us their stories, wait for others to share their joys and sorrows, wait. Just as Jesus is patient with us every single day, he calls us to do the same with others. May we try it this Lenten season as we take in deep breaths and, in doing so, take in real life, real meaning, real joy.
Written by Lori Wilson
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