Waiting to adopt a child can help us wait for Jesus: Thoughts from our experience with Benjamin.

We are waiting for Benjamin. Kathryn starts kindergarten; we celebrate Clara's third birthday and the wedding of Phil’s brother. Life does not stop, nor does it always feel miserable. But the waiting colors everything. We feel an undercurrent of loss under the flow of daily life, because Benjamin is growing up on the other side of the world. Often I work with an ear open for the ring of the phone, hoping for good news. Around the activity of life hovers hope for an end to our wait.

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and try to calm my unsettled soul with Scripture. For a period of time, the verse I first remember is “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:12). I try to call to mind something more encouraging, but that statement lodges persistently in my thoughts. Deferred hope is making my heart sick.

I meditate on verses about waiting. Wait for the LORD; be strong, and take heart, and wait for the LORD (Psalm 27:14). As I wait for Benjamin to come home, the Lord challenges me to wait for him. What does it mean, this phrase “wait for the Lord”? What do I do to wait?

Waiting seems important, something God often gives to his people in their pilgrimages. Abraham was told clearly what his happy ending would be: A son, who would have sons and grandsons innumerable for everlasting posterity. His work for many years was to wait for that son. Abraham and Sarah became restless for the promise to be fulfilled. The length of the wait made it seem there must have been a misunderstanding, so Sarah thought of a way to make the promise come true by letting Abraham conceive a child through her servant Hagar. Hagar did bear Abram’s child, but later, when the promised Isaac came, Sarah could not bear the sight of the other boy, beginning generations of hostility between the half-brothers. At times Abraham and Sarah waited well, but their lapse in faithful waiting brought deep and long-lasting pain.

The Bible is full of others who waited. Some show faith in their waiting, and some do not. Some inspire and others warn. David was homeless as he waited for the promised kingdom. Nehemiah, exiled in Babylon, longed to go back to Jerusalem, but fasted and prayed for four months before approaching the king about it. The nation of Israel, waited hundreds of years for their Messiah.

Then, in the bridge between Old and New Testaments, we meet Simeon and Anna. Simeon was a righteous and devout man. The Holy Spirit had promised him that he would not die until he saw the Christ. When Mary and Joseph brought eight-day old Jesus to the temple, Simeon recognized him, took him in his arms, and praised God. How many years had Simeon been waiting from the time of God's promise to its fulfillment? Did he know that he would meet the Messiah as a newborn baby? We do not know. But it seems that he was waiting expectantly and with faith.

Anna appears on the same day. She had been married seven years before her husband died, and had probably been without family for at least sixty years. Had she waited for another husband? Had there not been a brother of her husband to marry her as the law prescribed? Years ago, had she waited in longing for a family? Again we do not know. We do know that by this time of her life she worshiped at the temple night and day. She too was surely waiting for the Messiah, a waiting that was fulfilled at the end of her life, when she saw, recognized, and prophesied about him. Simeon and Anna show us faithful waiting, waiting that does not know the time or means of fulfillment, that worships the Lord while it waits, ever alert for his appearing.

We may enjoy waiting for a short time when fairly sure of a pleasurable outcome. We bear it even when uncomfortable when we know it has a finite end. But we do not like waiting when the length and outcome are unknown. We like to see around the bend in the road, to know what is coming and when. It would be easier to wait, for my single friend who longs for marriage, if she knew whether or when that was in God's plan for her. The critical illness of a loved one is so awful in part because we do not know how it will end. The wait for the return of a rebellious child would be less painful if we knew that someday he would return. And waiting to adopt a child is hard when it goes on month after month with outcome unknown.

Perhaps these waits in our life strengthen us for the ultimate wait. For Jesus told us to wait for his return, and gave us parables to show us how to do it well. He said that we are like maids expecting a bridegroom. Some are ready to wait, with extra oil for their lamps. Others are not prepared, run out of oil and then are shut out of the wedding banquet. So “keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour” (Matthew 25:1-13).

Jesus tells us to give attention to how we wait for him.

Abraham waited for God’s promised son. Anna and Simeon waited for God’s promised Messiah. We wait for God’s promised return. We also wait for a baby.

The ache and uncertainty of our waiting can sharpen our longing for God to return and make all things new. I do want to wait with faith and dignity, as I imagine Anna and Simeon did, and not as Sarah and Abraham in their caving moment of weakness. I want to worship while waiting. I want to have staying power as I wait, not faltering when the wait is long and the outcome unknown.

Our opportunity for waiting well is now; when Jesus arrives, it will be over. He tells us to think about how we wait, alert for his coming while we worship and work for him. Perhaps we can take these trials of waiting as gifts, exercises that teach us how to keep oil in our lamps, so that we do well for the wait that matters most.

Adapted from Carried Safely Home: The Spiritual Legacy of an Adoptive Family by Kristin Swick Wong (FaithWalk, 2005)

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