The following post originally appeared on the Prison Fellowship International website on January 3, 2011.
Several of my neighbors began the new year suffering from the ill effects of their year-end revelry. What must have seemed like a lot of fun as the old year drew to a close, morphed into nauseous aching pain as the new year dawned.
Dear friends, Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
To say that I am a person who “hates” waiting would be a complete understatement. For me, waiting feels like a total waste of time, an empty void where nothing happens except impatience, frustration, and annoyance. Whether it involves waiting for a scheduled appointment with the doctor, it feels like they purposely make people wait; or waiting for an inattentive driver to respond to the traffic light that has already turned green for at least a second or more; or waiting for my wife to get ready so that we can get to church on time, it does not take much waiting time for me to become thoroughly impatient and irritable.
A quotation often attributed to Blaise Pascal came to mind this past week – “there is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator.”1
I had been reading a newspaper article about a provocative new book that examines the relationship between a person’s image of God and their attitudes to economics, justice, social morality, politics, love and life in general.2 “It is the shape of God,” I said to myself “and how that affects my interaction with the world – my worldview.”
A beautiful Fuji apple, my favourite variety, had been on my desk all day and I was anticipating the sweet succulent taste of that apple. When finally the moment came, I picked it up and took one huge bite — of disappointment.
When I was a child my mother insisted that I finish the food on my plate before leaving the table. Usually there was a problem, I really did not like some of the food she had put on my plate in the first place.