Lesson in Waiting

Anticipation.

As the adage goes, good things come to those who wait. The real question, though, is how long you should have to wait for something good to happen. Think about how hard it is to wait for, say, a child to be born, or your upcoming wedding. We can wait a little while for these good things but, mostly, we humans are not very good at waiting. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we are constantly aware of the relative shortness of our life span and do not want to waste our little block of time. Some studies have shown that if you live to be 70, you will have spent a full three years of that life simply waiting for something to happen — waiting in traffic, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting on hold, waiting at the airport. We spend a lot of time anticipating, and we get more than a little frustrated if we have to wait too long for what we want or need. 

One person relates that when he was in the Boy Scouts, he had the opportunity to go to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. For 10 days, the platoon hiked through the mountains and valleys of this beautiful place. He points out that their food was dehydrated, so access to water on the trail and at the various camping sites was important. One day as they passed other platoons on the trail, they heard that their next campsite was dry and no water was available. Looking at their map, they decided to hike an extra three miles to another camp where they heard there was a natural spring. When they arrived at the camp, others told them that the spring was yielding about a quart of water every two hours. Platoons would have a two-hour time slot to collect the water (which would not be sufficient for their needs). He remembers how their entire platoon sat by that spring, watching each miniscule drip fall into their small collection pot. The time between each drip seemed like an eternity, during a two-hour period that seemed to last forever. In that time, they learned not only about patience but also how they had spent their lives taking for granted the simple necessities of life.[1]

Part of the problem is that the chronos time of the ticking clock governs us, but we often forget that the rest of creation tends to work on a different timetable. We are watching minutes and seconds, while the earth is marking time in epochs. While we are frantic to get things done, creation is a lot more patient.

Take, for example, an experiment begun in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Australia. Parnell wanted to demonstrate to his students that some substances that appear to be solid are actually liquid, so he heated some pitch — a petroleum-based substance known for its stickiness and high viscosity (this is the stuff Noah used to waterproof the ark, if you recall) — and sealed it in a funnel-shaped glass tube. After three years, the pitch had coagulated, and Parnell unsealed the tube to see how long it would take for the now solidified mass of pitch to drain out. The “Pitch Drop Experiment” was born.

The result? Well, let us put it this way: By the time the first drop began to form two years later, most of Parnell’s students had graduated. By the time the first drop actually fell, those same students had likely forgotten Parnell and the experiment altogether. It took eight years for that first drip to drop. It took another eight years for the second drop to fall. Professor Parnell died in 1948, which means he saw only two drips (now there is an exciting life!), but the experiment keeps going. As of 2009, only eight drops have fallen, while a ninth has formed and could drop at any time. A Web cam is set up at the University of Brisbane so the world can watch it, assuming you have nothing better to do while you’re waiting for, say, paint to dry. The experiment is so slow that the Guinness Book of World Records lists it as the longest-running experiment in history — a record that should not be broken any time soon. Scientists estimate there’s enough pitch in the funnel that it will take more than 100 years to drain out, outliving all of us, too!

After the eighth drip, scientists calculated that the viscosity (“stickiness” to us liberal-arts majors) of pitch is roughly 230 billion times more than that of water. Comparison to the viscosity of Heinz Ketchup is unknown, but our guess is that the eight years it would take to pour a drop of pitch on a burger would not be worth the wait anyway. 

Is there a reflection on some spiritual healing here?

 

When I cannot understand my Father’s leading,

And it seems to be but hard and cruel fate,

Still I hear that gentle whisper ever pleading,

God is working, God is faithful, ONLY WAIT.

—L.B. Cowman, Streams in the Desert.

 

A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. —Henri Nouwen, Eternal Seasons, p. 48.

 

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made bypassing through some stages of instability — and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature slowly — let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them, as though you could be today what time (that is grace and circumstances acting upon your own good will) will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give your Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, priest and scientist, The Making of the Mind

 

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[1] —G. Andrew Engelhart III, in e-mail correspondence with Homiletics.