Dear Friends,

So, I can’t remember when, exactly, but at some point in the early 1990’s I visited my sister in South Florida. It’s funny, really, that I can’t remember the date or occasion for the visit, but I can remember a particular crosswalk sign we encountered! (Yes, you read correctly: a crosswalk sign - as in the sort mounted on a pole near the intersection of two busy streets.) The sign tickled our collective funny bone because, rather than saying “Wait,” the sign said “Don’t Start!” As in, “If you’re not already in the crosswalk when this sign flashes on, don’t start walking across the street!” We still laugh hysterically when one of us says, “Don’t start!”

[Sidebar: I reached out to Sister to check the memory. This was in North Miami Beach, shortly after Hurricane Andrew, actually. Those images are still seared in memory, too. Sister added that there’s an associated Florida joke attached to “Don’t Start” - she also says similar crosswalk signs are in Dunedin, a town near her current home - but I’m not gonna put the joke out there for the world to read. You can ask me on Sunday if you really wanna know! End of Sidebar.]

Jokes aside, waiting is oh so very hard, huh?

I suppose the crosswalk sign, the one that has to give a more specific command than “Wait,” had to be developed because, even if it’s in our own best interest, we’re simply no good at waiting. “Fools rush in,” or so the saying goes, ya’ know?

I’m sure I don’t have to belabor the point (but when has that ever stopped me?): we live in an instant gratification world. We can’t wait for another cycle of the light, so we hit the gas when the traffic light turns red. (Anybody else noticing that this happens more frequently and more-seconds-into-the-red these days? Maybe this tendency contributes to the need for the “Don’t Start” signs?) We can’t wait to save up for whatever-shiny-thing-we-think-we-need, so we put it on credit (or worse). We can’t wait for our own anxieties to subside, so we dump our frustrations on others in order to quell the storm. I’m sure the list goes on. And on.

Lucky for us, the church is about to enter her annual season for exercising our collective waiting muscles. I mean Advent, of course. Only 20 more days before the advent of Advent! And, even though Sunday’s text is another time warp sort of reading, it’ll sure help us sort out what it is we’re waiting for and why it’s worth the wait.

See you Sunday!

Peace,

Lisa

PS: If you’re trying to catch that Waiting song that you can’t quite remember, maybe it’s a Foreigner song from 1981? That’s the one I was humming, anyway.

Photo credit: Kamilla Isalieva on Unsplash