There was a wealthy business consultant who decided to landscape the grounds around his lovely home. He hired a woman with a doctorate in horticulture who was extremely knowledgeable.
Because the business consultant was very busy and traveled a lot, he kept emphasizing to her the need to create his garden in a way that would require little or no maintenance on his part. He insisted on automatic sprinklers and other labor-saving devices.
Finally, she stopped one day and said to him: “There’s one thing you need to deal with before we go any further. If there’s no gardener, there’s no garden.”
There are no labor-saving devices to help us grow spiritually. For you and I to bloom and become the person God created us to be requires time, attention and care. We hear that wonderful line today in our first reading from Isaiah the prophet addressed to God the Father” “We are the clay and you are the potter. We are all the work of your hands” (IS 63:16B-17,19B; 64:2-7). This is the First Sunday of Advent, a time for us to get ready for the rebirth of Jesus in our hearts.
God is making something beautiful out of each one of us. We are like clay in God’s hands, twisting us, bending us, pounding us, squeezing us and touching us. God does this through the events, big and small, that have happened to us in our lives – births and deaths, successes and failures, sickness and wellness, gains and losses, acceptance and rejection. God has been the potter and we have been the clay.
God is never finished with us. Each and every day as well as throughout the stages of our lives, God is molding us and shaping us to become what? To become like God. God became like us, he sent us Jesus in Bethlehem, so we could become more and more like Jesus, his beloved Son.
Jesus in today’s Gospel (Mark 13:33-37) says that we have to be on the lookout for God. We don’t know when God is going to come. Jesus tells us that we have to wait. Waiting is so difficult in our world today. We get so impatient just waiting for something to come out of the microwave oven in a couple of minutes.
There is not a place on earth where more waiting goes on than in a hospital waiting room, the intensive care waiting room. Urgent questions get asked in intensive care waiting rooms. Will my husband make it? Will my child walk again? How do you go on living without your companion of fifty years?
The intensive care waiting room is different than any other place on earth. And the people who wait there are different. No one is rude. People can’t do enough for each other. The distinctions of class and race melt away. A person is a father first and a person of color second. The garbage man loves his wife as much as the university professor sitting next to him loves his wife. Everyone understands this. Each person pulls for everyone else.
In the intensive care waiting room the world changes. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone there knows that loving someone else and pulling for the other guy or gal in the room is what life is all about.
How we all could learn to really love others…. if we only realized that every day of our life is another day in the waiting room!
Thanks to Cedric Fauntleroy for the picture.
When was the last time YOU were in the Waiting Room of a hospital? Did YOU pull for the other people there and for what they were going through? How can this be applied to YOUR life today?
GOD CREATED HEAVEN AND EARTH IN ONE DAY. WHO’S TO SAY GOD CANNOT CHANGE YOUR LIFE IN ONE DAY?
Someone YOU know is going through a lot. They’d enjoy Treatsforthesoul.org.
