Waited

I took a particularly ill-timed walk today. This has happened on at least one other occasion, lately, when I have departed my home or office in a world of sunshine, and have encountered, when leaving my favorite local eatery, the beginnings of ill weather.

This time, rather than toughing it out, I found for myself a very fine pine which seemed to be keeping its undergrowth dry, hunkered down with my back to the telephone pole, and waited for the weather to wear itself out.

Did you know that on a warm day (or maybe every day, I’ve never stopped to look before), when the rain hits the pavement, the roadway steams? Mostly there was a very fine mist that worked its way downhill, but every once a while a car would pass the other way, and, for a moment, there would be a traffic pattern of moisture, nebulously moving in the correct directions.

Gradually, as I watched, the space kept dry by my sturdy pine was overrun. Tiny rivulets of flood tentatively flowed over the asphalt until the streams cascaded down the bank of the roadway and into the storm drain, where their music lulled me for a time.

I’ve been having this waiting problem, you see, which is to say that I’ve been waiting very badly of late. There’s quite a bit for which I need to wait – for more work to materialize (which does not excuse me from working), for some of the tectonics of my household to shift, for many of the exciting things upcoming this summer…and I’m doing it wrong. The waiting, I mean. I alternate between losing myself in media of various kinds and focusing exclusively on the pot, waiting for the stainless little jerk to boil.

So, for half an hour today, God forced me to slow down. I’d left my phone when I headed to lunch, and so I couldn’t entertain myself with Twitter, couldn’t leave, had to stay planted at the foot of that tree, and had to wait in silence. Had to observe and be amazed and be silent, and wait.

There are waiting hours for us. Hours of anticipation, when our destination on the road seems so interminably close that we find it all too easy to neglect to look around – to see the  landscape and the rivers and trees, to enjoy our presence on the road. It is an art I had once, and am re-discovering, the art of letting my anxieties go, as Christ calls me to do, and submitting myself to the plan He has in place for me, not only the road itself but the pace He has declared. And if, on the way, I am struck dumb by the beauty of rainwater on asphalt, all the more glory be to God.