I have spent the last few days on a short trip to Southern California for a long promised trip with our liturgical dance group, La Danza. It has been a wonderful few days with the chaperones and the young people as we visited Mission churches and the Cathedral parish in the Diocese of Orange. In the middle of it all we spent a day at Universal Studios.

Admittedly, I am not a theme park person. I will confess to never having set foot within the confines of Disney Land or any other major park in my life. I did enjoy the rides that I went on and the shows that I saw. It was fun to see the young people animated and excited about their shared experience of the “rides.” What I found most interesting was the willingness to wait. It was the willingness to stand in line for an hour so that they could spend the short time on the ride to capture the thrills and excitement of that moment.

Waiting is a big part of God’s plan for us. He waits and we wait but it is always, much like the park rides an active waiting where we are (or should be) moving towards our goal. Which brings us back to those long waiting lines…people basically waited in three ways. 1. The talked with those around them. 2. The distracted themselves with their telephones. 3. The stared with a comatose expression into space.

Is our waiting for God similar to this? If we are like #3 (and I can be this way) it is like I am saying to God, “it’s your job to make me happy and entertain me and if you don’t I will go to another line and wait to be entertained there.” In other words: my faith life is dormant until activated by something that will usually be in short duration before the comatose stare infiltrates the mind again.

If we are like #2, I think we can guess this one. (I, again, can fall into this pattern) it is where we will do everything and anything to keep our minds off where we are and how we are coping with the wait. We wait for the high moments but pay very little attention to our overall interaction with God. Perhaps it is just a Sunday Mass that we think of God and during the week (or several weeks) between Mass we allow the distractions of the world to drag our focus away form God.

Finally, if we take life as a conversation with God and his holy people (#1) we find the wait an enjoyable and less tedious reality that we all must endure. It is when we are engaged in the conversations of life that we recognized our shared gifts and blessings and find that we remember and relive the joys and excitements of the past as we move slowly towards those great and powerful experiences with our God and other people. When we take time to share who we are, our experiences and memories, our hopes and future love without condition with God and his holy people we discover that life is abundant and those high moments are joined by conversations of love.

God Bless

Fr. Mark