400 years of silence. All the promises from God throughout the struggles and upheavals of history now gone cold. Prayers falling on deaf ears. So many generations of lives lived, wars fought, exiles endured, within this immensity of waiting, with no word or sign.
How can we who do not wait, have no capacity of endurance, even fathom living our lives within such waiting? And there was nothing. No word, no glimmer of possibility, simply a wall of silence. Even Abraham, that paragon of patience, had new words of promise as doubt began to invade. And he did not wait well. Not really. Otherwise there would not have been an Ishmael.
Yet, despite how well or poorly people wait, the time is not any longer of shorter. 400 years is 400 years for faithful Jews living thier lives as best they can, for rebels and would be messiahs ending their lives on wooden crosses, for all the rest of the world, groaning in expectation.
When the waiting ended, a babe, born in a humble place to lowly parents, heralded by angels and stars, but who of any import saw those? Not what anyone expected. So, many still wait, having missed the point of it all, their expectations still unmet.
If I have the promised Messiah that all of history revolves around living within my heart, why am I still struggling against the waiting, still expecting so much more than I already have in full. Could I have missed the point somehow?
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