One of the adult groups that I facilitate at the church had a special Advent series focusing on listening to different voices in our community. The four part series included listening to theologians, children, indigenous voices, and poets. To focus our conversation for the second week, we listened to author and illustrator Kevin Henkes read his book “Waiting” to a small group of children. During that presentation, Henkes commented to the children that he thought that it is harder for children to wait than it is for him now that he is an adult. The idea struck me as consistent with my experience and I’ve been observing examples of how different people behave while waiting for the few weeks since.

My attention has been focused on our there-year-old grandson this week. Waiting is frequently a part of his everyday experience. He wakes hungry, but has to wait while his parents prepare breakfast. He wants to get to play activities, but has to wait until the adults finish breakfast. All throughout the day he has short periods of waiting for others. He can’t drive, so he goes places on other people’s schedules. He needs an adult to accompany him when he rides his bike around the neighborhood, so he has to wait until someone can go with him. Perhaps having his grandparents visit means that he waits a little bit less, but it still seems like he is always being asked to wait.

Sometimes he gets frustrate with the waiting. Not being one to keep his emotions to himself, he lets us know that he is frustrated. It is easy for me to relate. I remember being frustrated with times when I had to wait for others. I think that I have become a relatively patient person, but I was not always so.

I can remember how difficult it was to have to wait for big events such as the arrival of Christmas or my birthday or summer vacation. There were days when it seemed like the clock on the wall of our classroom had nearly stopped its advance towards recess or the end of the school day. I tried to distract myself and not allow myself to look at the clock for periods of time so that I could see the hands advanced, but I rarely was able to do so for very long.

I’m pretty sure I bored friends with my tirades about waiting rooms. I was offended that other professionals lined up appointments in such a way that forced me to wait for their schedules. I felt that my time was as valuable as my doctor’s time. If an appointment was for 10 am, I expected it to start at 10 am, not to be ushered into a waiting room for 15 minutes only to be taken to an exam room and being instructed to wait more. The very existence of waiting rooms in medical facilities is an example of the inefficiency of the system. They design physical space, constructed at large costs, just to keep people waiting. I can go on and on about the subject, but it isn’t very entertaining and it may be as repetitious as waiting for a medical appointment.

A very good friend once suggested to me that I could change my attitude about waiting by looking at a time of waiting as a gift. “You are always wanting more time for prayer and wanting more time to sit and think, but when you are given the gift of time, you sit and stew about how inconvenient it is to wait.” The more I thought about my friend’s comment, the more it made sense to me. My attitude towards waiting makes a huge difference.

I am trying to keep all of that in mind as I prepare to travel again this week. Airline travel involves a lot of waiting. Depending on the size of the airport, one needs to arrive two or more hours in advance of a flight’s departure to go through the process of obtaining boarding passes, going through security screenings, and orderly boarding. Flights can be delayed and involve more waiting. Some of that waiting involves standing in line, another example of inefficiency in my opinion. Even with the relatively long flights of this trip diagonally across the United States, we will spend more time waiting than we will spend flying on our trip home on Thursday.

Still, it is amazing that we will be able to travel a distance of nearly 3000 miles in a single day. We will wake up in South Carolina and have supper in Washington. The change of time zones works in our favor when traveling west, so our day will be extended, but it is still a pretty remarkable feat to cross so much territory in such a short amount of time. Our part in that travel, of course, involves sitting and waiting. In addition to waiting for our flight to board, we will need to wait while others stow their luggage, wait while the crew completes paperwork and ground inspections, wait while the plane taxies, and wait while it flies to its destination. We aren’t the ones controlling the machine. We are the passengers in the back, waiting.

I’ll take that waiting. I’ve enjoyed monumental road trips that cross the country and for this trip in this season of the year, I am grateful that we are able to board airplanes and make the trip all in one day. The high speed travel, even though it involves waiting, gets us to our destination quicker than driving.

I suspect that as I age, I will have to become even more tolerant of waiting. My schedule is already more flexible than that of some of my friends. Because I don’t work full time, I have more time that is discretionary. I seem to have plenty of activities to fill my time, but it is practical for me to wait for others who are busier than I. As I become less abled with the normal processes of aging, I’ll need to become more tolerant of waiting. The day will come when I won’t be able to drive any more and, like my grandson will have to wait for others’ schedules to go places.

It makes sense for me to practice the art of waiting and see the times when I need to wait as a gift of time to practice. I’m not completely sure, but I think it is getting a bit easier for me to wait.