TOGETHER: Tune your heart to the wait

Posted: 12/14/07

TOGETHER:
Tune your heart to the wait

Rosemary says I am a terrible “waiter.” She says everywhere I go, I have to have a handful of stuff to read or a list of calls to make or a piece of paper to write another list on. I can’t stand to be waiting with nothing to do.

Executive Director BGCT Executive Board

When we served a church composed of military families in Germany, we learned they know a lot about waiting. Husbands and fathers often were gone for weeks at a time. They accepted the waiting as a necessary part of being in the Army. Soldiers told of being gone from their families during World War II for three, four, even five years without furlough.

Can you imagine that kind of waiting?

While living two years in a German village, we were introduced to Advent, which instantly made sense to me. Here was a way that Christians through the centuries had reminded themselves in a daily way that Christmas is about Christ. Each day in the homes, an Advent calendar with Scriptures and prayers would mark the days of waiting for Christmas.

I learned that the four weeks of Advent begin with a solemn time of darkness in the sanctuaries as the people of God await the coming of the Light. I never could quite carry it off with my congregations. We could not keep it solemn and dark until Christmas when the Light would appear. We Americans (maybe especially Baptists) are very impatient. We don’t like to wait. So, we would sing the plaintive “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” on the first Sunday of Advent, but by the second Sunday, we were singing, “Joy to the World, the Lord is Come.”

This has been a season of waiting for Rosemary and me.

In just a few weeks, I will retire as your executive director for the BGCT. Frankly, I haven’t had much time to think about it. Several matters still need my attention. I am trying to figure out how to “phase out” my tenure in this office. I have never retired before.

We wait patiently as the search committee for the new executive director does its work. Let me encourage you to wait with eagerness, something like we do for Christmas. We have a great committee at work, and you are praying for them.

God will guide them to the right person to take up this holy task.

I have learned that if you will put away your stuff for awhile and lean into God’s love and joy for you, you will grow bigger of heart and vision.

Your soul will expand.

It may be the Apostle Paul was thinking something along these lines when he wrote in Romans 8, “All around us we observe a pregnant creation. … The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs, … That is why waiting does not diminish us. … We are enlarged in the waiting. … The longer we wait, the larger we become and the more joyful our expectancy.”

My prayer for you is a heart tuned to the wait.

We are loved.

Charles Wade is executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Executive Board.