Seeing God's Love in the Waiting

Advent, Week Two

As Covid-19 began to reshape the world in the spring of 2020, we made a difficult decision to return to the States. Within a couple of hours of our scheduled flight, the departure board at Soekarna-Hatta International methodically changed from showing departure time to "Flight canceled." We were on what literally became one of the last flights out of Indonesia.

That journey was, I believe, the most grueling of our many international treks across the ocean and back. It began with a one-hour flight from our home in Central Jave to the capital of Jakarta, followed by sixteen hours of waiting in a eerily empty Soekarna-Hatta, a place usually busting at the seems with people. With few shops open, and toting around a 2-year-old, sixteen hours with nothing to do seemed like an eternity. We were exhausted before we even left the country.

Then came an eight-hour flight to South Korea followed by another twelve hours of waiting, a fourteen-hour flight to Seattle, a one-hour flight to Portland, and finally, a five-hour drive to Coos Bay, Oregon. What made this journey grueling was not the flights but the waiting!

We're not very good at waiting, are we? Yet the season of Advent invites us into precisely that sacred space – the pause between promise and fulfillment that shapes our faith in unexpected ways.