When?
This year for so many of us, it’s more of a burden than a question; a heavy weight we have carried as 2020 has marched relentlessly on. And yet here we are 9 months in and the answers are still no clearer than they were in the spring.
When will we see our family again?
When can we travel or gather together?
When will there be a vaccine?
When will life return to ‘normal’?
And the truth is, we simply don’t know.
We never did. Not in 2019 or any year before that.
We only thought we did because we had some semblance of control. Dates in calendars, plans scheduled months in advance, like trail markers of our own making leading us step by step down an unknown path.
The path is still unknown my friends, the only difference is, this year, there are no markers.
And so, many of us find our lives on pause, waiting for direction, for the markers to magically appear to guide our way once more.
It’s not a comfortable place to be.
Yet the irony is not lost on me that we are just now entering Advent—the season of waiting.
A broken and weary world waited once before for a Savior. It’s waiting again for His return. And right now, we’re somewhere in that messy middle. Longing for Him to restore all the hurt and pain and brokenness and despair that is our everyday, constant reality. Waiting for, hoping for, and anticipating the time He has promised will come; the ‘when’ we will one day see.
We may not know the exact timing but we can be sure that He does. For this is the God who said, “At the right time, I, the Lord, will make it happen” (Isaiah 60:22, NLT); the God who ordained a time for every season under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3); the God who calls us simply to wait on Him (Psalm 27:14).
This advent season, as we wait with hope and expectation for our Savior’s birth, let’s surrender those ‘whens’ to His care. Throw off the burdens, untie the chains that bind us, and trust an unknown future to the God who knows all things, who “is before all things and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
The whens will come. But first, let’s find joy in the nows.
