This video can be downloaded here to use in your online services and offerings.
Transcript:
In these short weekly video messages I've been exploring the theme of gifts;
God's good gifts to us.
And sometimes those gifts of course are very easy to receive, they're gifts that bring us pleasure,
they bring us enjoyment. But other times of course the gifts can be more difficult, they can be accompanied by a sense of responsibility; how are you going to use this gift for good? Or indeed they can be more challenging still and today I want to just briefly explore the idea of waiting as a gift.
It may seem very strange, I'm not someone who enjoys waiting, very few people do I think.
I'm one of those who gets frustrated in the supermarket checkout queue
wishing that the person at the checkout would move more quickly or wondering why the queue next to mine is moving quickly and mine is standing still .Yes I can get frustrated in the waiting,
impatient. But what, I wonder, if we were to start to see that waiting in itself as a gift from God? It's a little bit like the idea of prayer,
isn't it, that when we pray to God we sometimes receive a response straight away other times we don't and we have to wait for God to answer our prayer. And in that waiting we're invited to place our trust in God,
place our trust in that that hope that's in God's good time God will answer the prayer.
So in this time of waiting that's we're all involved in, as we wait for the end of this pandemic and the end of the lockdown, wondering what life will be like at the end of it all.
We're invited to explore what it means to wait and to see this gift of waiting. Many of us at the outset assumed that it would all be over in just a few weeks and then of course the weeks turned to months and now the months have gone on and we're not far off the one year anniversary.
This has been a hard period of waiting with many challenges for all of us.
But my simple invitation is to explore the idea of waiting as a gift. Wondering perhaps if God is inviting us to learn what it means to watch; to see what God is doing to recognize the signs of God at work among us. Sometimes in the small and unnoticed ways, the interactions between people,
the acts of kindness and generosity, and the way people care for one another.
Maybe these are the signs of God working among us and maybe as we wait we learn more about what God is doing and so we find our waiting transformed.
Less about frustration and longing for it all to be over and more about a wondering of what God is doing. So simple prayer for you whatever your circumstances as you watch this today that in your waiting you would know God with you opening your eyes and opening your ears to see more of what God is doing around about you and placing your trust in him for whatever the future may hold.