Fedrick Beuchner said that possibly the most authentic thing we can do as a Christian is wait.  I read this in a sermon he wrote this morning.  In the sermon he wrote of how his father committed suicide, then his father’s brother, and then his grandfather died of what he suspected was a broken heart.  I can not imagine the racking pain and depths of darkness those times must have been for Beuchner, who was at age 10 when all this transpired.  I can not give an adequate account of this sermon, so I ask you to believe it was one in which a predominant message was of hope.   Beuchner tactfully and gracefully made his faith palpable.

Even so far I fear that I may have marred the message of this great pastor.  My intention and hope is to fill in the voids that would leave you in darkness by my own reactions to the sermon.

I read it because I feel like there is a longing in me right now.  I want to find the perfect girl, make a 4.0 GPA in college, and learn to play Bach’s French Suites, Shubert and Beethoven sonantas.  Half of me is saying that these are great goals and the other half of me is screaming brow beating messages that these things are sins.  I’ve confessed and confessed and poured my heart out and pouring out now, and every where I turn the message is “Wait!”  I feel like a child who has been neglected by God sometimes, so I bury my face into a pillow and lie in bed until I can think of a reason to force myself up.   I feel so awkward and so out of place.

Beuchner writes his sermon inspired by the story of Jesus telling his disciples of the end times.  Something cosmic will happen, be it in our hearts or in the actual cosmos, and it will be fulfilling like a fig tree full of a new harvest of fruit.  I like the fact that there is something huge that is going to happen, that behind all of life there is something bigger, out of the scope of imagination, and completely fulfilling.  …so in the mean time we wait.

Waiting not for a fairy godmother who will take her wand and make me into a music scholar with a great wife.  The waiting is perhaps what is foreshadowed by worship.  This waiting is one that realizes our present be it in pain or great joy, but hopes in what is beyond these things, hopes for the promises of the Messiah.  This is where the sermon spoke to me.  I did not feel condemned, but I felt I was given a promise beyond my hopes and a blessing, a blessing in waiting.  I perhaps have to tone down my ambitions for this world in order to worship, but I don’t think that excludes entirely the joy I find in playing music or in studying or my hopes to find a woman.  Could it be that our actions can be actions of waiting, actions that become worship to this wonderful Messiah?  Instead of being paralyzed by the anxiety that my life is pointless and I’m going no where and then not being able to get out of bed, today I choose to wait.