Waiting and Wildernesses: Reality Failing Expectation

(above: photo of Almanzo Wilder fades into image of Covenant Seminary alumnus Curtis McDaniel; the Wilder house in Mansfield, MO)

Recently, John Roberts (MDiv ’99)--head of school at Covenant Christian School--let me tag along on a 6th grade retreat, where we toured Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Mansfield, MO home. The short doorframes gave way to low ceilings, narrow stepped passage ways, and generally uncomfortable-looking furniture. It was overall…disappointing. Not because it was somehow not what Wilder had written about, but because it was rooted: planted in one place, timed, real. I was disenchanted walking through the same spaces, touching the same walls, turning the same knobs.

Good writing is timelessness, otherworldly.

There is a comfort (like home) in words that in reality grows cold, strange, and utterly unfamiliar. The hot summers described burn blisters on the imagination; in reality, heat is a debilitating inconvenience. The thought of cold is a pain that produces reflection; real cold simply numbs to incoherence. That house, described in all its reality, took on imagined forms that transcend a single place at a particular time. Reality undoes imagination, and the exalted becomes common again.

The problem is not with imagination nor with reality, but with expectation. Expectation serves as an interpretive key to our experiences. Where otherwise we would have heat or cold or an old wooden farmhouse, expectation places demands on the passage of time and experience. And when expectation fails, there is dismay.

Tim Frickenschmit (MDiv ’07) reminded me (and the congregation of All Saints) as much, in this sermon from September 4, 2011. We expect things from people, from life, even from God. But all of these—foremost God—are unpredictable. God does not succumb to our expectations.

Tim states, “Genesis ends with these words, ‘Joseph is put in a coffin in Egypt.’ That’s how the book ends… That’s to point out something that Joseph knew: that God’s people were supposed to be living in the land of Canaan, not dying in the land of Egypt. But Joseph also knew that this was not the end of the story, that God would visit his people…and take them to the land of Canaan, but he would do so in his timing. And his timing was four hundred years. That’s a long time to hold on to a dead man’s bones… It’s apparently not too long to wait when you are dealing with the God of the Bible. Because not only here, but throughout the scriptures, we see time and time again that waiting is a part of engaging with God, it is part of being in relationship and communion with God. All of the people in the Bible, throughout it…everybody waits.”

Waiting is not generally something I expect.

I expect expedience and am dismayed when I have to wait. I expect health, and am dismayed with illness. I expect life and am dismayed by death. There is no failing in my ability to imagine a world without waiting, illness, and death. The deficiency is with reality.

The Kendall family knows something is wrong; imagination has Walt (DMin ’09) living to 93 not dying at 55. Curtis McDaniel (MDiv ’09) knows something is wrong; expectancy would give birth to a child, not loss. Waiting sucks (I can't think of a more descriptive word), especially when imagination can produce such worlds of expectation that the faintest indications of sin are pushed back into the fading recollection of bad dreams. Then reality breaks in. We turn the knobs of those once-closed rooms to see—expecting magic and glory—but seeing only dust, cobwebs, and worn out furniture.

This is the wilderness of life. Israel expected to go north toward water and war (in Frickenschmit’s words). I expect reality to match imagination. God is unpredictable. “And God’s unpredictability can and will make us doubt his presence with us.

“What God does in redemption is…to transform us into people who will follow him, regardless of where it is that he leads…. That’s really why he sends Israel into the Wilderness. Ultimately, it is an act of grace…and love. Israel, like us, needed to learn to follow after the Lord. The text always places God with his people, but always places God before his people—leading them. Israel needed to learn to follow, and what a better place than the desert. God leads his people into the desert to develop faith in them and reveal himself as their Savior. The wilderness reveals God as absolutely necessary and exclusively available. Friends, all people will suffer, but the promise of the Gospel is that the Lord will take the pains of his people and transform those pains into something that he uses to gain our hearts and transform our lives” (Frickenschmidt).

Perhaps it is not that I expect too much, but that I expect too much, too soon, today.

It’s the waiting that’s hardest: Laura waiting for Almanzo to finish the fireplace. Curtis waiting for the resurrection of his child. Me—waiting for words to make the otherworldliness of books into the common experience of the life, but without the growing neglect that comes when there is too much of a good thing.

Here’s to the expectation of waiting, and the wandering in wildernesses the world over.

Joel Hathaway
Director of Alumni and Career Services
Covenant Theological Seminary