As a new wife I struggled with meals. I mean the pasta would be hot, just not at the same time as the broccoli. Or the sauce. Somehow thinking backwards for timing when to start each item addled me. But John was patient, and I gradually got better. For a few years I solved it by only serving one thing. Plus someone invented a microwave.

 

Christmas is a time of waiting. Children wait for the party to start. Parents wait for the brown UPS truck. People wait in lines at the mall. Drivers wait, impatiently, in congested traffic. One year it took me forty five minutes just to get out of the parking lot. It was a badly designed lot, but still. 

 

The first Advent included waiting too. A nation waited for a Savior to come deliver them. Joseph waited until Jesus was born to take his wife as his own. Anna waited at the temple for eighty years to see the Christ. The Holy Family waited in Egypt until it was safe to return home. 

 

I was talking with a friend who feels like she is waiting for her marriage to get to the next level. They are raising their kids, they eat supper, he goes to work. But the laughing that was so abundant in their dating years has evaporated. Heart to heart conversations, once so frequent, are a rarity. Hugs used to be a daily flourish. Now they are seasonal. She longs for connection, but when she asks for it he is skittish. In the absence of intimacy, she is lonely. Very lonely.

 

Single people are often still waiting for marriage to start. They try looking in all the right places, but so far it eludes them. How is that fair?

 

Waiting for pasta when the tomato sauce is getting cold is annoying, and could be averted by a more efficient chef. The flow of cars can be managed more agreeably with good signage. Fed Ex hires contractors to expedite their systems.

 

But I wonder if the waiting that seems endemic to marriage is a result of mismanagement. God could in all probability skip the middle part between starry eyes and rocking chairs. He could assign us partners, and avoid all the confusion. Yet either the relationship itself, or the materials He has to work with... that would be us... seem to slow things down. 

 

I have some theories about why love cannot be overnighted, or zapped, or airlifted in. 

 

But I will get back to you on that. In the meantime, I am waiting too.