Scripture tells is that today, they waited. After the detailed, blow by blow, almost breath by breath account of Thursday and Friday, Saturday goes past in “once the day was over”. All there is to do is to wait it out. It can be passed over in a short silence in the telling, but it must be lived through at 60 minutes an hour, 60 seconds a minute – each breath, each heartbeat. We cannot make this go any faster – we cannot force tomorrow to come any quicker than it comes. We can fill the waiting with distraction, with directed energy or even prayerful contemplation. What we can’t do is make it go away. We can’t get tomorrow today – whatever tomorrow is.
In our waiting we are reminded, we are made brutally aware of the limits to our capacity. Things must happen, and we can make some of them happen – but some of them happen as they do, at the right time, with or without our intervention. And today suggests such things might be the most important ones – the deep-down-changing ones, the will-make-the-world-a-different-place ones.
And so we wait, for some things are outside our control and beyond our expectation. We wait, keeping busy or entering the stillness of doing nothing, we wait for what we do not know. The unknowingness signals the waiting – it is the willingness to wait what will be without deciding it beforehand; it is the offering of, embracing of, trusting of a space – and waiting to see what – if anything – will happen.
It is attentive, expectant, alert, offered.
And so we wait….