The last few days have been traveling days for me. After church on Sunday we set out for a week of vacation with my family in southern Ohio. Often this is a flying trip but this time we did the road trip through the farmlands of Wisconsin, across the flatter lands of Illinois and Indiana and then into the rolling hills of Ohio. This trip is one I have taken many times. There are familiar spots along the way, markers that we are half way there or nearly there. Some of the markers have been shined up and look better than I remember while others have grown shabby over the years. There is a sadness to see them diminished.

Driving across this land in March, these fields that are home to the ‘bread basket’ of our country, look much different than they will in just a few months. For as far as the eye could see, fertile soil rolled out mile after mile in its waiting time. Waiting for warmer weather. Waiting for tilling. Waiting for planting. Waiting to come into its fullness. Rich dirt,turned over so its black color shone was, like the human who observed it, waiting for the season of spring to unfold. This   view of the waiting fields was only interrupted by a single white farmhouse plunked in the middle, home to the farmers who were likely also in the same suspension of season. Looming over it all were the enormous wind turbines gently fanning their angel wings over the waiting game. Something about these tall, white pinwheels always pulls at my heart…..their power to harness the wind and create unseen, yet experienced energy. Seeing their slow turning always expands my heart in my chest. 

Waiting is something that is difficult for most of us. Our impatience almost always gets the best of us. And yet the opportunity to observe these fields in their waiting stages brought about a certain patient pull in me. To look out over their expanse and to know that, soon, they will be giving birth to life that will then feed the lives of thousands can instill a patient hope for what is yet to be. I wonder if the farmer feels the same. I wonder if those who make their homes in the houses dwarfed by land yet unyielding look out over the black soil and experience that patient hope. Of possibility. Of promise.

No matter our work, no matter the landscape that greets our eyes each morning, we have a fickle relationship with waiting and patience. These days of Lent can be an invitation to be, simply be, in this particular day of this forty day journey. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Not the ritual of Ash Wednesday….not yet the alleluia of Easter. The fields of Lent still stretch before us and though we may have planted some seeds within the soil, patient waiting is still required. 

Lent, which comes from an old English word meaning spring, holds the promise of new life. But it is a new life that does not come with the fast paced, do-it-now, immediate pace to which we are accustomed. Instead, it is the ‘slow work of God’ with which our faith community has been reflecting over these last weeks. Slow work that thaws frozen ground. Slow work that allows planting small seeds and trusting in the movement of Sun and rain to pull and water them. Slow work that begs the humans observing to breathe more deeply, to keep an eye on what might happen when control is turned over to the Mystery. 

And perhaps, this is the greatest lesson of all in this long, waiting season.

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