One of my favorite people in this world is my Mom. She is a very generous, kind-hearted, hospitable, servant. As a kid, one of my favorite memories was when she would come into my morning before school and wake me up by singing, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You will never know dear, how much I love you. Please do not take my sunshine away.”In the hands of my mother, I felt safe, nurtured, cared for, and attended for.
As I get older, that feeling has slowly gone away. Not because my Mom is not that way anymore but because that person is not there anymore. When I started growing up, the attentiveness that I received as a child started fading away. Like every other adult, I had to start waiting for things.
Most children have the luxury of certainty. They know where everything is coming from and they know when it is coming. They know that their parents will be there to provide it for them. As adults, however, that luxury is taken from us. We are left in the uncertain place. We are in the painful place where we have to wait for those things we need.
The waiting space is the moment of transformation for adults. When we read the Bible, we see the waiting space is the place right before our liberation. Henri Nouwen says it best when he says this,”Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be.”
This pattern of waiting is seen over the Bible. We see it when God’s people are lost in a desert for 40 years before entering the promised land. Later, it is found when Paul is forced to wait on God to remove a thorn that was painfully hurting him. Even Jesus had to wait three days before being resurrected from his death.
Even though God gave us our parents to be the blessed guardians of our childhood, and they often give us our first glimpse of God, yet, we are called into something greater. We are called, like the Jewish people to leave the desolate society and enter into the promised land. The struggle of the desert is acknowledging and surrendering to our own powerlessness. Becoming an adult, spiritually speaking, is to become aware of our own powerlessness, and trust in the God who brings people out of the desert place, removes thorns and brings Jesus back from the dead. It is a God, mysterious in form, asks us to trust in being okay with unknowing and asks us to participate in the resurrection. This resurrection comes not only in our very being but by bearing witness to God’s hope in our presence to the powerless around us.
