We’ve been in major waiting-mode in our family this year. On Mother’s Day, our daughter Anne and her husband, Ryan, shared the news that they are expecting their first child—and there is a significant likelihood that by the time this devotional is distributed and read, they will have already given birth. The due date is November 30. To say that we all have been waiting, that Anne has been expectant, that we have all been longing for this arrival—the advent of this “long expectant child”—is the understatement of the year. No, we don’t know what they are having. It will either be a boy or a girl. But it is only one child, and we are waiting on the surprise.
And for those who are curious, the jury is still out on my grandparent name—such a “Boomer” thing to wonder.
This news was what we had hoped for over the last couple of years. When Anne gave Lib a Mother’s Day card in May with a shot of the sonogram in it, I promise you that Lib leapt more than John the Baptist did in his mother’s womb when Mary showed up expectant with Jesus.
So many of you, I know, have walked this same path: the waiting, the longing, the wondering when fulfillment would come. It’s something endemic to the Christian life. While children wait for Santa to come, expectant parents wait for the baby to be born, the followers of Jesus wait... and wait... and wait.
It’s hard, it’s difficult, and this seemingly endless pandemic makes everything—even waiting—more difficult. But Paul reminds us that waiting, especially when it involves suffering of any kind, produces character, and character produces hope. As the last line of Shawshank Redemption reminds us, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing. And no good thing ever dies.”
Hope, my friends. Hope that Christmas comes early with a vaccine that is effective, that in 2021 I win “Grandfather of the Year,” and that the “hopes and fears of all the years” will truly be met in Jesus.