I've spent a fair amount of time in hospital and clinic waiting rooms. Sometimes I'm there as a nurse accompanying a patient or a friend, sometimes I'm there with a family member, sometimes I'm there for myself.
I don't know many people (beyond those who have chosen the health field as professionals) that actually like going to hospitals or clinics. People are rarely in those waiting rooms because they want to be. They are there out of necessity. They know they are hurting and they've come for help. They know there is something not right with their bodies and their response is to do something.
Clinic and hospital waiting rooms are a community of the broken and wounded. Time stops, frozen as it were with only the moment important. We rely on kind professionals who are strangers to walk us through the steps of our procedure or surgery. Though nervous, we wait with hope and expectation that there is an answer, a treatment, a reason for why we are hurting. We wait with faith, even when the odds seem so against us. As we leave, we glance at the time in surprise. "How did it get so late so soon?"
We want to believe that we will get better, that the darkness of sickness and the pain in our bodies will not be forever, that we will one day be well.
How like this time of Advent, where we recognize our need for help, where we wait in nervous expectation for God to show up. We wait with faith, knowing that the Incarnation is a living reality, not a half written fairytale. We sit in the shadows, knowing that there will be light.
We too are a community of the hurting and the broken, welcomed not by a kind professional who is a stranger, but by a God who promises rest for the weary, hope for the hopeless one, and light in the dark shadows of life.
As we sit in this sacred space of God's waiting room, we are not alone. Instead, we are part of a worldwide community waiting in the shadows for light we have been assured will come. And with this, we have the awesome privilege to "participate in communion with the global church in awareness of our desperate need for light."*
"I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.
Psalm 27:13-14
* Shadow & Light by Tsh Oxenreider