How good are you at waiting? I guess your answer to that question depends a lot on what it is that you are waiting for. It probably also depends on how long you have to wait, or whether you even know the answer to that question.
One of the challenges at this time of lockdown is that in a lot of cases we simply don't know how long we are going to have to wait. The government has given us some initial dates when certain things may happen (assuming that other conditions are met) but there's lots of things that we simply don't know and we just have to wait.
And waiting can be hard.
Yesterday we had a meeting of the preaching team as we continue to plan for the autumn term. But although we have been told that church opening is included in the July 4th date - what that actually means is very far from clear. So as we try to plan for the autumn are we planning for fully online church still, fully open and back to normal church (highly unlikely) or somewhere in between the two? In the end, we agreed that we just have to wait a bit longer before trying to make any decisions.
Some of you will be aware that tomorrow is Ascension Day. Ascension Day comes 40 days after Easter and marks the day when Jesus returned back to heaven at the end of his earthly ministry. And one of the things that Jesus said to his disciples was that they were to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit. He didn't tell them how long they would have to wait - but he had told them that after he had left he would send the Holy Spirit.
From what we know about Peter, I imagine that he was probably more than a little impatient to get going with the task of making disciples (see Matthew 28:19-20). But I also expect that his experiences over the last three years, and particularly over the last 40 days, had led to him trusting in Jesus' words more. So if Jesus said 'wait' they would wait.
They had learnt to trust God and to obey him.
Here's this week's assembly from Barton on this theme of waiting.
