In the Waiting

Eastertide blessings, Y’all! How’s your coffee?

In one of Jesus most famous sermons he talks with folks about the difference between living in waiting or waiting to live.

If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

Matthew 6:30-33, The Message

Jesus tells us not to be anxious about or to be distracted by tomorrow. The Greek word that the good news writer Matthew uses can also mean to not be drawn in different directions.

Prior to these words, Jesus gives us the prayer form we know as the Lord’s Prayer which includes the request: “Give us today our daily bread.” These words echo the time that the our ancient faith ancestors, Jesus own ancestors and the ancestors of most all who would have attended this sermon, lived in the wilderness as nomads completely dependent on God’s provision. God gave them bread from heaven, the substance of which they’d never seen, each day to sustain them physically. They would wake in the morning and it was covering the ground. They were only to only collect what they and their family needed for the day and any overages would spoil by the next morning.

We like to see this teaching as a simple way to tell each other not to worry and in doing so, we miss the depth of these words. Both being anxious and being distracted by the future prevents us from experiencing God and each other fully.

I think we all understand what it is to be anxious or worry about what might possibly happen in the future, but do we ever consider how looking for the next “whatever” (job/house/gadget/event) distracts us from living fully? If we constantly anticipate, we can’t truly be grateful for what we have now. When we always want something else or something more, we are saying that what we have isn’t enough.

“Give us today our daily bread.”

Wait.

Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.

Matthew 6:34, The Message

Stay where you are in God’s presence, undistracted, living fully as you are, where you are.