Malcolm Potts 25th March 2018 ~ Waiting

I have been embroiled in some strange conversations this week.  Some of them have been about Kieran. We are still waiting for a determination from head office to make the pathway clear for him to join us. They have their reasons for questioning some things, but from my perspective, what’s the hold up?  Get on with it!  It feels like we are dangling like a carcass on a hook.  It feels unfair on us AND especially on the Carrs.We love to pop out truisms like, “All good things come to those who wait.”  But we don’t really believe that do we?  It’s just a throwaway line to deflect the pain of someone who is suffering in the pain of waiting when we aren’t. Would I say that to a kid in Syria who has been thrown out of his home and is living under plastic in a desert through absolutely no fault of his own? “Don’t worry, all good things come to those who wait.” Cruel words.This Palm Sunday, consider the well-worn story of the man riding down that steep, steep hill into the Kidron valley then up into Jerusalem.  Jesus was the culmination of the waiting of the Jewish people.  They had waited for a Messiah for centuries.  They had waited under oppression and dispossession.  They were angry and they knew what they wanted.  They had it clear in their minds what their awaited Messiah would do......and it did not take long for Jesus to let them down.Don’t tell me you’re good at waiting. We have designed the world today to avoid waiting at all costs. And the more powerful we are the less waiting we expect to do.But here is the thing!  God’s holy book the Bible is a book about waiting.  How we wait is one of the most important things about us.  How we and Kieran and Ruth wait is the centre of God’s purpose for us as individuals and as a church right now.  It must be!Scripture encourages us to wait expectantly but with humility.  A modern day thinker I was listening to recently defined humility as, “valuing what you don’t know more than what you do know”.  What do you think of that?  He went on to say, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be learning?”  As we wait and Kieran and Ruth wait, what are we learning, what am I open to learning?  What were those who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem open to learning? As my learned thinker said, “Are you the tyrant king who has everything all figured out or the ever-transforming fool [hero] who is getting better bit by bit all the time?”As we wait, hold these beloved Carrs in your prayers.  I am pushing and prodding how and where I can but for now we wait.  Rather than seeing it as waiting on the powers-that-be and the bureaucracy, let’s see it as waiting on God. Blessings Malcolm