Originally published in the Catholic Times, Dec. 15, 2013    vol. 63:11

Advent is a time of waiting: Waiting for Christmas and waiting for God to gather us all to into the new life of resurrection.

The past few months have given me a new perspective on waiting. I had full knee replacement surgery and have spent time waiting for healing and for pain to fade. It has. Waiting for the knee to move without stiffness and effort. That’s coming, bit at a time. I was prepared for the work required to help move through the physical challenges even if it some times seem slow. This is active waiting, not sitting around until all was well, but doing the hard work of therapy, incorporating new exercises and routines into life. I expected that once on the mend, the trajectory would move consistently in one direction: Better. The reality has been more like a roller coaster ride, with ups and downs with plateaus thrown in now and again.

What I was not prepared for was the mental and spiritual challenges that came with the experience. Fighting depression and discouragement has been as important as doing heel slides. Someone told me that the drugs used during surgery and later to keep pain at bay contribute to the mental stress. Moving through this part of healing requires as much work as keeping the knee limber.

As I move through this personal time of waiting, I find myself pondering the meaning of waiting in general. Why do we continue to wait when outcomes are not what we expect? What do we wait for when reality of day-to-day life is difficult or, as it is for many people on this earth, overwhelming?

We wait because we have hope. There’s no sense in waiting without it. We hope because we have memories of something good. Of someone trustworthy who kept a promise. You can’t hope for something unless you trust you are going to get it. Those people who first enable us to trust may well be our mother and father. If that’s not the case, they could be a brother or sister, a teacher or a friend.

I wondered about young Mary who accepted God’s invitation to become the mother of God. Mary, who waited for nine months as her child grew within her womb and who trusted in the promise spoken by the angel: He will be great. He will be given the throne of David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever. He will be called holy, the Son of God.

She knew the prophecies. What was she expecting? How did she imagine the promises would be accomplished? She worried when he stayed behind in Jerusalem to sit and talk with the teachers in the temple. Was she surprised when he became an itinerant preacher or when he raised the ire of powerful religious and political leaders?

As his life unfolded, hers did too. She listened and watched, prayed and pondered. Not knowing how it would all turn out, she went on living and trusting that God is faithful, even as she stood at the foot of the cross. Her people had endured much suffering. They had a lot of practice waiting.

One of the Hebrew words we translate as “wait” has as its root a word meaning, “to bind together,” as in twisting. You twist everything good in your life together, making a chord out of all the strands you can gather. And you hold on.

Mary held on. She gathered strands not only from her life, but also from generations of those who had gone before. The Hebrews suffered in Egypt and the desert, but they arrived at the Promised Land. With the Psalmist, she could say, “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.”(40) or “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope…O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plenteous redemption.” (130)

I’m glad Mary and her people are part of my story. As a Christian, I add their strands to those gathered from my own life. I draw strands from my family’s stories and faith. Together our chord is strong. As we work to do our part in bringing Christ into this world, we also wait. We are able to wait because, in the end, we are one family and we hope for one thing: The fulfillment of God’s promise of Love and Life.

© 2013 Mary van Balen