Yep. Ample time.
All you have to do is grab that little paper number and stake out one of the comfy stacking chairs which inhabit almost every government office, and that busy pace of life we all work so hard to maintain will crawl into a corner of that sterile and cheerless room.
And die.
As I was thinking the other day as I basked in one such office, it's sort of a Christmas miracle to have an hour of free time to myself this time of year!
When I say "to myself", I of course include the lady with tuberculosis sitting to my left who keeps coughing into my purse.
And the kid kicking the back of my seat.
And the guy across from me who smells like Woodstock and french fries. (Incidentally, it's amazing how long some people can stare at you without blinking!)
Really. There's no place I'd rather spend an afternoon. Lovely place. There is even a nice televised loop of free public service announcements about how to buckle a seat belt and the importance of filling up your tank with gas BEFORE leaving for a trip. So helpful!
And so here I sit, contemplating the universe. Well, actually right now I am mainly contemplating numbers.
Like the vast expanse between the numbers 27 (just called) and 53 (mine), and the number of things on my to-do-list that grew up, got married, and had babies since I got here, and the number of gray hairs I will have when/if I ever leave.
OK. Just in case you didn't catch the sarcasm thus far, let me spell this out. I loathe the way our government sucks the productivity out of my life every single time we interact.
It makes my throat constrict just thinking about it.
Be that as it may, after much contemplation I cannot agree that standing in line (or sitting in line, or rocking back and forth while curled into the fetal position in line) is in itself a bad thing.
It seems to me that God has allowed many, if not most, of our human interactions to be some variation of standing in line. Either we are standing in front of someone, impeding their progress, stealing their time, and forcing them to rearrange their priorities--a "service" I performed for my parents for the first 20 years of my life and which my children are currently performing for me--or we are standing behind someone, making accommodations for them, as I began to do when I got married and have done more and more as each one of my seven children arrived.
At age 22, I believed I was a generally benevolent, kind, and altruistic person. At age 42, I can say that I have only begun to plumb the depths of my selfishness and the narrowness of my heart for others. My change in perspective was made possible by the gift of having my progress impeded, my time stolen, and my priorities rearranged on a regular basis for 20 years as I "stood in line" behind the needs of my husband, children, friends, family members, and fellow congregants.
You could say that this sort of waiting has little to do with the queue at Walmart or the doctor's office, or the Department of Motor Vehicles, but I disagree.
When you start to look for them, lines are everywhere.
They almost seem designed into the process of being human (for Biblical examples, think of the waiting endured by Moses and Abraham, Joseph, Sarai, Elizabeth and Zechariah, David, and Jonah, to name a few).
Human beings need to have their fingers pried off the illusion that they can control the events and relationships in their lives. God has means of teaching this to us in the daily sacrifices we make for the people who cross our paths--both those we know and love intimately, and those we share space with for a small time.
Lines are just a tiny way of saying "my life for yours" as we watch a cashier check a price for the gentleman in in front of us at Walmart, or as we say a prayer for the patient who is holding our doctor in an extra moment of conversation...
...or as we share a wink and a smile with the little tyke who is doggedly kicking the back of our chair at the Department of Motor Vehicles:)
Lines put us behind and before each other and make us stay there long after we want to, facing both one another and ourselves. I have had conversations at Tim Horton's, in the waiting room at my car repair shop, and at the airport that I never would have chosen had I not been held captive by the persistent proximity of a line of strangers.
With enough practice, I hope to meet the prospect of a long line with a hint of expectation instead of a load of irritation. Between those small inconveniences and the larger ones provided by the little (and big!) ones whom I know and love, maybe I will one day achieve the kind of graciousness I see in people like my mother.
She took care of my grandmother in her home for eight years. During those years, Mom took her whole life and the place she could have traveled with my dad, the events she could have attended, the skills she could have honed, the gifts she had been given, and she put them all in front of a tiny, frail lady with dementia and said, "I will wait right here."
And I have rarely seen such love, except perhaps from a God who lived in perfect freedom outside the bounds of time for all eternity, and yet voluntarily bound Himself into the suffocating linear constrictions of minutes, hours, and days to show us how to walk in a line with each other--face to face or shoulder to shoulder, one slow tick at a time, one divinely appointed interruption after another.
He could have chosen to relate to us from a distance at His convenience and in His element, but instead laid down His rights and entered into history at one of its most inconvenient and unpleasant points, pressing His great power and majesty into a humble lifetime, measured day by day in big and small sacrifices for the lost ones who needed to see how it was done.
Perhaps He wanted to show us that the real adventure of life lies in the unexpected pacing and surprising plot lines that keep popping into the comfortable and convenient narratives we try so hard to write for ourselves--or maybe I am just trying to comfort myself in the face of all the hours I have spent waiting for things that didn't happen on schedule, happened differently than I expected, or never happened at all.
In any case, Merry Christmas!
May you have enough lines in your holiday to make you stop the bustle, look around, and purposefully connect with some of your fellow sojourners down here in the waiting room of life.
And may God, in His wisdom, continue to confound our plans and make us wait on and for each other as He sees fit!
*******
Philippians 2:3-8
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or empty pride, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, existing in the form of God,
did not consider equality with God something to cling to,
but emptied Himself,
taking the form of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross.
1 comment:
You have blessed me again with your thoughts and words. Merry Christmas to you & yours!
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