“Come back and see us,” she said. “We’ll be here.”
And as we turned in our coats to go, she caught me once more: “And enjoy yourselves. Have fun.”
This was just after she’d said she was bored of bingo, and couldn’t they offer more activities for the long, dark nights at the nursing home? She’d worked her whole life, she said. She’d been a schoolteacher for thirty years and had reared some good kids — even the rowdy boys who’d been a headache to corral. She loved her work. She had gone at life, giving herself to it, not sitting watching “Gunsmoke,” waiting for life to roll away like the credits to music (drowned out by the heater).
“Time flies,” she told us kids, just after she’d said the days at the nursing home crawled. The cafeteria windows stared into a courtyard. The food was okay. Here, time did not fly the way it had when she’d been teaching and raising kids. Here, time was late in coming.
Here, she was late in time.
Maybe that’s why she told us to have fun, because she hadn’t known it herself in a long time. But when she asked us to sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” right there in the lunchroom (and when the whole cafeteria sang with us), she seemed to smile brighter, and to have more fun, and to cling to the promise of that song more than any of us.
I went hunting with my brother before the antlerless season began. He had the gun, I brought a book. I’d heard it would be long and cold, but I had not been told how wonderful it would be to watch the light move. We climbed into the stand at midday, then sat, and besides the rocking trees or chattering squirrels, the only thing to watch was the light. It changed by the minute, and it changed everything it touched. The trees were brown, then copper, then gold, then a deep violet as the sun cooled into twilight. Every time I looked up from my book, the clearing wore a different color, the shadows had shifted, and I would never have seen this were I not sitting and waiting for a deer to step through the clearing.
Time does not fly when you are waiting. It moves as slowly and beautifully as the light at the end of day, casting shadows here, changing colors there. When you are waiting, you notice both the length and beauty of it.
This has been true, for me, in courtship. It has been a year of waiting. Waiting for Zoom to load; waiting for my phone to ring; waiting for a letter from him; waiting at the window for his truck to pull down the drive and to see him again. Time does fly when we’re together — it soars. When we’re not, the weeks slow down, but I will be the first to tell you there is something beautiful about this. Like studying the evening light from the deer stand, we get to watch each other from a distance as we slowly shift and change under the sanctifying hand of a good God.
You might say that Jared and I are early in time, only in our twenties. We aren’t waiting in one of life’s last lunchrooms. But even so, we’re all waiting for something, aren’t we?
Simeon was waiting for the consolation of Israel. In other words, he’d been waiting for Mary to have her baby before Mary herself was born. Jesus didn’t come when Simeon was a young man, but he did come in the “fullness of time” and “at the right time” (Gal. 4:4, Rom. 5:6). When he did, Simeon was ready.
Even so, I like how the hymn says, Late in time, behold Him come, because it recognizes that waiting — in a wheelchair, from a deer stand, in courtship — feels long. But also, that the waiting itself is what trains all our senses to listen, watch, and hope. It makes us sing in the lunchroom and watch the sky and wait at the window for the day when He will come.
Featured image by Freepik
You can find more stories on her blog, https://bethanyjmelton.com.
- Late In Time - December 2, 2024
- Tookish Bagginses - January 4, 2021
- The Song That Was Sharper Than Sting - August 24, 2020
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