It’s Over! At last, the waiting is over, it’s time to celebrate! The prophesy that Jesus will rise from the dead after three days has been fulfilled!Last Easter, we were flooded with more than a hundred Easter messages. Some messages emphasized that the Resurrection is the basic foundation of Christian belief, other messages boiled down to reminders of repentance, forgiveness and renewal, taken in various contexts.
All these messages are indeed inspiring but what really struck me is the message on waiting, I think it holds much relevance in our daily lives.
As the world becomes supposedly less obscure because of technological advancement, we still find ourselves waiting…waiting every day. We wait in line at the supermarket cashier counter, wait for that high paying yet less stressful job, wait for our crush from the other classroom to pass by our corridor, wait for the Lord to answer our prayers or even wait for that very elusive perfect relationship.
A research made showed that an average person spends approximately an hour everyday waiting in line, which totals to about 2 to 3 years in a lifetime. Statisticians have estimated that in 70 years, the average person spends at least three years waiting! The figures are surprising indeed but the bottom line is that in every man’s lifetime, he will always have to wait for something. This is life’s reality but the grim reality remains that a lot of people do not have enough patience to wait. They complain for a few minutes or hours of waiting and think that this is too rough.
If this is too rough, how then would the Israelites think of their 400 years of waiting to cross the Promise Land? How about the thousands of years spent waiting for the Messiah?
But why then do we always have to wait? There are a lot of benefits of waiting, and the benefits go beyond the physical. Waiting is a test of our patience. Waiting strengthens love. Waiting renews our strength. And most importantly, waiting increases our faith in our Creator.Most of us sometimes do not want to wait. Sometimes, we would want God’s instant presence as we pray, His instant granting of our requests. We sometimes are more in tune with our own will than with God’s will. There are many instances when we are prepared only to hear what we want to hear and refuse to wait with an open mind to hear what God might have to say.
But we have to wait with hope rather than with optimism. People who wait with optimism later become frustrated and depressed while those who wait in hope succeed. Waiting with optimism usually implies a temporary confidence that all will turn out for the best. It suggests a failure to consider things realistically and contain a willingness to be guided by illusion. The result? When things do not come up the way they planned, when what they were waiting for did not come, frustration results.
Waiting in hope on the other hand, suggests confidence in which there is no self-deception and which is the result of a realistic consideration of the possibilities. Whereas optimism is the belief that things are going to get better, hope is the belief that we can make them better.
This reminds me of the story of a woman who waited with optimism but failed in the end. The woman waited for 20 years for her lover who is a married man to marry her when he would be free. The woman patiently waited but when the man finally became free after his wife died, he would not marry her. There was another woman, actually other women waiting for his freedom, aside from her. It was really frustrating for her because she gave him the best years of her life, and now that she has grown old, she would be dumped.Waiting, really is important, it helps us grow strong but we have to learn to wait in hope!
“Yet those who wait for the LORD will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.” (Isaiah 40:31)
