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I don’t know about you, but when I think about waiting at the moment my mind straight away heads right towards a topic we’ve become all too familiar with over the past 18 months. The Coronavirus pandemic has for many of us shown us just how fragile the world we build for ourselves truly is. Our supposedly well laid plans becoming little more than a distant memory in the face of such crushing darkness. In the words of Margo Roth Spiegelman “From here you can tell just how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town... Paper people in paper houses living paper lives, burning the future to stay warm.”
Of course this quote is really more about how society as a whole has become little more than a slave to keeping itself going, a fact which has been exposed in excruciating detail by the pandemic and lockdown, but I think that there is a real wisdom in those words. It is a pretty widely accepted truth that this world and everything in it will not be around forever. Science today has all sorts of theories as to how the world as we know it might end, from climate change, to asteroid impact, to the sun expanding, all the way to the inevitable heat death of the universe, and even ignoring all that, we all at some point will have to come to terms with the fact that our life on this green planet is but a fleeting moment when compared to the sheer scale of the cosmos.
In Mark 13:2 Jesus himself says of our great buildings that “not one stone here will be left on another.” In Matthew 6:19-21 he tells us not to store up for ourselves treasures on earth, as they are temporary and will be destroyed. In other words, when we rely simply on our own strength or abilities or knowledge to make our way in life, we are ultimately destined to fail.
Covid-19 has produced a catastrophe the likes of which few of us have ever seen or ever likely will see again in our lifetimes, and has seriously shaken up what we thought we knew about how we as a people connect with one another, but if there is one positive thing which has come out of this time, it is that in many ways, it has forced us to take a step back from the chaos of modern life and refocus on the things that really matter: Our friends, our families, and perhaps most importantly, our faith. In a world where everything we’ve ever known is breaking we have a simple choice: Hold onto God and His promises and ride the wave, or break with it.
Periods of transition are often painful, and nowhere in my life has this been more apparent than at the end of my time in Cardiff. I won’t go into too much detail right now, as we would likely be here all day, but in short, of the three years I was there, the second was a complete disaster, and the repeat year I had to take as a result was really no better. Just when I finally felt like I might be on top of things and have a chance to get somewhere, a combination of a pretty nasty stomach bug and a particularly intense weekend doing puppetry knocked me completely out of action for two weeks, and just like that, that which had come together commenced to fall apart.
I started falling further and further behind academically and for reasons I won’t go into became pretty disillusioned with the church I had been attending at university. To make matters worse, around the same time my relationship of nearly a year and a half collapsed and I fell into a pretty dark downward spiral of loneliness and depression.
Despite all this though, I can genuinely say that it was in these moments, when it seemed like all hope was lost, that I felt God moving most powerfully in my life. It was through leading a hall group in my repeat year in Cardiff that I met some of my closest friends from that time - a few of whom I’m still in contact with – who came alongside me when it just seemed like everything was destined to crash and burn. It sounds like such a small thing but it was this little reminder, this hope, the hope of an as yet unseen, distant light at the end of the tunnel that kept me going in the waiting. The knowledge that this was not the end, that something far greater awaited on the other side, even if in the moment such a hope seemed impossible.
As you can hopefully tell, that story does ultimately have a happy ending, as it kick started a chain of events that led to my writing this today, but at the end of the day I am not doing this for my sake, or to elevate myself, but because I genuinely believe that God has a plan for us that is bigger and better than anything we can possibly know or imagine. We need not fear suffering, or hardship, or even death, because through Jesus we are to be set free from those things by the power of the Holy Spirit, as adopted sons and daughters of the living God. We need never be hopeless because with Jesus we can never be irreparably broken. As Paul writes in verse 24: It is in this hope we were saved. More than that though, he also writes that hope that is seen is no hope at all. We do not just hope for things that we already have, but more than that we hope for things yet to come, for newness of life in the new creation, and that, in my opinion, is a hope worth waiting for.
I want to leave you, as I often do, with the words of a song, "Sovereign Over Us" by Michael W. Smith (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lay-r2g52SQ), which I think pretty well sums up this passage:
There is strength within our sorrow
There is beauty in our tears
And you meet us in our mourning
With a love that casts out fear
You are working in our waiting
Sanctifying us
When beyond our understanding
You're teaching us to trust
Your plans are still to prosper
You have not forgotten us
You're with us in the fire and the flood
You're faithful forever
Perfect in love
You are Sovereign over us
You are wisdom unimangined
Who could understand Your ways
Reigning high above the heavens
Reaching down in endless grace
You're the lifter of the lowly
Compassionate and kind
You surround and you uphold me
Your promises are my delight
Your plans are still to prosper
You have not forgotten us
You're with us in the fire and the flood
You're faithful forever
Perfect in love
You are Sovereign over us
Even what the enemy means for evil
You turn it for our good
You turn it for our good
And for Your glory
Even in the valley You are faithful
You're working for our good
You're working for our good
And for Your glory
Your plans are still to prosper
You have not forgotten us
You're with us in the fire and the flood
You're faithful forever
Perfect in love
You are Sovereign over us
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