The Work Of Waiting Series

Some of you know that Steve and Susan Forrester are expecting a baby. On the other hand, some of you might not even know who Steve and Susan Forrester are. Steve’s the pastor of the Methodist church up the street, and Susan is one of the counselors at their counseling center. Anyway they’re really excited, and we’re excited for them, but the prep time is kind of difficult because they don’t know when the baby will arrive.

You see, they’re adopting.

They’re getting a Korean baby through Holt International, and they’re most of the way through the process. I wrote them a letter of recommendation and filled out a bunch of forms last December, and just last week they had what is called a home visit, which is the final step before formal approval. Now they just have to wait. And get ready. I asked Susan for permission to use their story as an illustration for my sermon, because it was so very much to the point. Because, you see, for the next several months their lives are going to be pretty chaotic. And one of the hardest things about it is not knowing how to pace the tasks to be accomplished between now and then. If they get it all done too soon, and the baby doesn’t come right away, how on earth will they make it through last couple of months without bouncing off the walls? But of course if they delay, assuming things will take a while, the baby will arrive before the nursery’s painted.

Waiting is hard.

And in the meantime you wouldn’t believe the chaos. They’re moving things out of the craft room into Steve’s study, but first they had to get Steve’s study ready, so they had to empty it out, and paint, and so on. You can imagine. And it means that Susan couldn’t be in our play - actually, nobody is going to be in our play, we’re not doing one this year due to low turnout - and it means that Steve couldn’t go to Honduras for the mission trip, and goodness, their whole year is completely taken over by this project. Is it all really worth it? I mean, just think how much easier life would be if they didn’t have this enormous change coming up.

Well, I expect you all know the answer to that. As Paul said, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

So Steve and Susan will often be frustrated - maybe even frazzled - over the next few months, balanced somehow between the now and the not yet - but one thing that they will not be is hopeless. They will not question the purpose of it all as they trip over the piles of unsorted stuff and sniff the paint thinner and mourn lost opportunities. Because every scrap of chaos, every expense and inconvenience, is made with a purpose in mind that puts it all in a whole different perspective.

Just so does Paul remind us, as God’s newly adopted children, that the way station called life where we spend our time between redemption and redemption is not the final destination. And it’s not just people, not just God’s children who are suffering in the chaos of the present time. All of God’s creation is in the same condition.

Somehow it’s hard to think of the creation as being frustrated, isn’t it? I mean, frustration is about being prevented somehow from doing what you want to do and so you have to think of creation wanting to do something it can’t do... and that’ all of a sudden gives us a new perspective on the created order, doesn’t it? As filled with beauty as it is, the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be.

It isn’t that way just because we human beings have taken lousy care of it, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also because the curse on Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 also fell upon the earth. The ground produces thorns and thistles, and we as their descendants get food - and energy and raw materials and all the other stuff that makes our modern society run - only by ‘painful toil’ and sweat. Paul sums up the results of God’s curse by the one word, "frustration." It means "emptiness, futility, purposelessness, transitoriness." It’s the idea expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities...All is vanity’ which in the NIV reads ‘"Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless!’" If it weren’t that we are waiting for something that makes it all worth while, the life we live "under the sun," imprisoned in time and space, is just as pointless as the Existentialist philosophers of our century concluded.