I cannot wait.
I cannot wait to blow out of this work meeting and go home and chill. I cannot wait for summer and the warmer weather! I cannot wait for retirement and all the time I will have. I cannot wait for the coffee to brew faster, or for the train to come quicker, or for the traffic to finally clear.
I just cannot wait.
So many of us—the truth is we cannot wait, for whatever the next thing is. For the work week to conclude. For our tyrannical two-year toddler to finally get to that next developmental stage. For our cranky high school senior to finally go away to college.
It’s like we are telling life: “Just hurry up already!” But is that anyway to live and live fully? To live faithfully and to appreciate the precious gift of life we receive from our Creator? If we cannot wait to get there and then, what about here and now? What if all of our rushing ahead cheats us out of being fully right now, and yes, even when right now is the last place we want to be?
Years ago, I was brand new in my current church job and I so wanted to be a good doobie and impress everyone, prove that they actually did hire the right person. So, each morning, I would fly out of bed and down the stairs to get the coffee maker dripping and then rush out the door to get the Boston Globe newspaper in the driveway. One frosty January week, I came flying out the door, skidded on black ice, went head over heels, totally airborne, then landed with a heavy thud on my butt. OUCH! This happened twice in one week. I recounted these woes to my spiritual director, and he dryly commented, “Maybe the universe is trying to tell you to slow down, John. What do you think?”
Yet even 17 years later, I’m still a chronic rusher, and don’t seem ready to slow down. To embrace the God blessed spiritual practice of being present in the present. Rushing robs us of enjoying what is right in front of us, leaning into whatever we are experiencing at a given moment. Life is amazingly diverse in what it can give to us. Some days I imagine I go through something like twenty different emotions in response to whatever is happening in my day. I get angry at the traffic and then cranky at too much email and then smile when my co-worker greets me with good humor and then I sing a song at full volume in the car on the way to an appointment and then I sweat on the bike at the gym and then I text my Godson and hear back about what ails him or what brings him joy and then and then and then and then.
Rush through life and such profound and simple life moments will be gone before you know it. As a homeowner in New Orleans prayed one morning on the front lawn of his flood ravaged house, a home my church group was helping to repair, “Dear God: help us to appreciate this lovely day, that has never been before, and will never, ever be again. Amen.” Maybe I should pray that prayer, live that prayer more often. Give up my addiction to hurrying up and insisting others do the same too.
GET MOVING! (Not that I’ve ever thought or said that in the Dunkin’ Donuts Drive-thru line.)
One of my favorite pieces of scripture comes from Psalm 46. Its author writes, “Be still and know that I am God.” Be still. Profound spiritual advice. To orient ourselves to God, we must first plant ourselves in the immediate, that which is, not that which we are running off to. God does not live in the past nor in the future. The only place we can find God, find joy, find true life satisfaction, is in the only time we have.
Now.
In a recent New York Times article, “Why the Rush?” Melissa Kirsch writes, “…the poet Marie Howe…in her poem ‘Hurry’, describes running errands with a child in tow. ‘Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,’ she urges, as the little one scampers to keep up. Then she wonders: ‘Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? / To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?’”
I cannot wait. We cannot wait.
But life needs us to wait. To pay attention. To be engaged wherever we are. To be alive, not pseudo-living in some imagined fantasy future.
It will all stop one day. This life and our place in it. Howe is right. We are all rushing towards the grave. So, in the interim and on the way, may our God put us, keep us, find us, love us, place us, right here.
We can wait.
The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.
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