Waiting & Watching With Grace

I spent a week waiting for Oakley and Julian’s babies to be born. Like human babies, the timetable is not perfectly predictable, and the signs of labor I recognized in their mamas were not theirs. But eventually, within hours of each other and three days after their due dates, both gave birth, and kids came mewling into the world—gooey, long-legged, rubbery-hooved, and floppy-eared—and beautiful.

We spend a lot of time in waiting—for good things and hard things. How do you wait? I wait for goat babies obsessively, my helicopter husbandry involving frequent trips to the barn to check for signs of impending labor. I am not proud of this.
For what, and how are you walking in the waiting as you journey through Lent, as winter gives way to spring, as we experience a new president in the White House?

I’ve been asking myself what I’m looking for as I walk and wait in this season of political unrest. Of late I've been sitting with the wisdom that suggests that what we look for is what we find, in each other and in the world. If I seek wholeness and serenity, I will find it; if kindness, I will see it. If I look for destruction, I'll find that, too, and if I focus on the brokenness residing in all human hearts, it will surely be evident. I wonder how what has my primary attention and focus shapes the largeness or smallness of my heart--how I live, walk, and respond to what I encounter every day?
What has our collective attention will surely shape how we collectively walk in the world, too. If we individually and collectively seek the good and wholesome, might we respond with gratitude and hope, sending grace into the cracks and crevices of the world in significant ways? If we seek the broken that is also always present, might responses of fear, anger and snarkiness add injury to the world’s wounds?

This is not a call for naive optimism that refuses to acknowledge that the world is shaken by chaos impacting socio-economic-ecological-political landscapes, but is a hard-won resilient optimism that recognizes a deeper Life holds all things together. A collective voice emerges amidst the fear, chaos, anger and criticism. This voice--coming from expected and unexpected corners--encourages hope, love, beauty and kindness. Increasingly, I learn of people turning away from the news, and instead, taking walks and meeting friends, and posting pictures of tulips and sunsets instead of guffaw and disgust. They are looking with gratitude at life, seeing beauty and goodness, and mercy unexpected. I am drawn to this path. They send lovingkindness to family, friends, strangers, and even some toward those they would call enemies.

It is a hard-won path.

I'm inspired and want to join in traveling through these times remembering we, and all of this, are part of a deeper story that invites us to live from places of gratitude, which inspire us toward love. Julian and Oakley birthed their babies in spite of political alliance shifts; snowdrops, crocus, and daffodils have already pushed up from their winter slumber. Life emerges to grace the world with newness and declares, "Hello, dear one. My name is Breath of Life, Divine Spark, Christ. Take heart. My Love keeps (and will keep) the universe from coming apart."

Yes. Things will change, and not all of them in the direction toward which I hope. Yet I can choose to look for that of God in all people, creatures, creation--and keep open the way for that of God in me to see that of God in you, and you and you, and even in those who do not acknowledge such a thing as a Divine Spark, and in those whose spark is but a pilot light barely kindled--yet burning and full of potential.

Joy unexpectedly comes when I touch this kindredness with all created people and beings. It inclines me toward lovingkindness--like that expressed by members of my church community who (two each week) stand outside our local Hispanic church on Sunday mornings, providing a presence that eases discomfort a tad for attendees desiring to worship with their community. They know we are prepared to politely ask anyone in uniform for identification and a warrant rather than to let them interrupt the sanctuary uninvited. ICE workers too, carry that of God, and I choose to assume some feel their own discomfort and ambivalence about their Sunday worship-disrupting task.

Quakers (and other contemplative traditions) hold that that of God is within everyone, and George Fox encouraged us to go cheerfully into the world, living with integrity so that that of God in us may see that of God in others. It is a waiting witness of a different sort, the long game that chooses to see all things as sacred, as bearing a Divine trace, treasured, loved, and held by God who will draw all things together.