Journal of Sacred Work

"We
wait. We are bored. No, don't protest, we are
bored to death, there's no denying it… A diversion comes along
and what do we do? We let it go to waste. . .In an instant all will
vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!"  (from the play Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett)

   My fingers tapped the steering wheel. My foot edged off the brake. I was late. I needed to accelerate. But, no, the light was still red.
   One of the strangest things that I do, along with millions of others, is to imagine, subconsciously, that I can make red lights turn green, minute hands go faster (or slower) or make lines move faster at the movie theater when the feature has already started.
   Rather than take responsibility for this silly behavior, I like to blame my efforts to control the uncontrollable on my father or my older sister, both of whom always seemed to be in a hurry. But, I guess that means that my kids would now be able to blame me for their own bouts with impatience.
   Why is waiting so hard, especially for fast-food Americans? In Waiting for Godot, the characters wile away a piece of their lives waiting for someone who never comes.

   Is this like waiting for God? Is it like the way we wait for hope, for the weekend, for justice, or for Love?
   It turns out that one of the key questions for all of us is how we spend our waiting time. Do we spend it, like Godot's character, "bored to death." Do we wait for retirement and end up so resenting our jobs that we let our work lives go to waste?
   The keynote of good, patient-centered, loving care, in the minds of patients, is often a question of how long they have to wait: for the x-ray, the nurse, the doctor, the MRI, the lab results or, perhaps most crucially, for pain medication. One of the great cruelties of our health care system is the way it makes people who are already sick wait for care.
   In spite of efforts to equalize care in this country, there is no question that the poor wait longer for medical care than do the rich. For some suffering patients, waiting for relief is like waiting for God. After all, what do so many of us say when we finally gain relief? We speak those lovely two words, "Thank God."