Well. Here it is. Not sure if it's what I expected but it's what happened. Merry Christmas. I hope that today you can take some time look for ways--often tentative, fragile ways--that God is being born in unexpected places in your life.
We are waiting.
In refugee camps, crowded with stories, crowded with pain, we are waiting.
In checkpoint lines, in terminals, interminable, we are waiting.
By hospital bedsides, with loved ones encased in tubes, we are waiting.
At psych ward nurses' stations, shuffling, in line for red pills, blue pills, pink pills, we are waiting.
By corner liquor stores, hands outstretched, pleading, we are waiting.
On Metro grates and airplanes, soup kitchen lines and traffic lanes, waiting, waiting, waiting.
All our lives this world has taught us: avoid it at all costs.
And yet, here we are anyway, desperate for distraction, driven to frustration, to panic even.
Waiting.
We wait, and in our waiting we gain some small sense of a waiting that echoes forever in the hallways of time.
We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--weep.
We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--dance for joy.
Do we dare to ask if God is here?
Do we dare to risk confusion? Disappointment? Amazement?
We are told of a light in the darkness.
And in this deepest night of our waiting, do we begin to perceive it?
We are so tired of waiting.
And we are looking, searching, on horizons and in hearts,
For this dawning, this flickering, fragile suggestion of the great light that is to come.
Merry Christmas.
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