Wait and See Days
Photo by Pille R. Priske on Unsplash
We are days away from the presidential election. Congregations I work with have understandably adopted a wait and see approach as they consider programming, capital campaigns, and larger cultural and infrastructure decisions. Wait and see to determine what will be asked of us, what will we know in November, December and January. Waiting to see how we will or will not respond. In this wait and see time, my mind returns back to two stories.
I met Naomi over twenty years ago in Danshui, Taiwan. My husband and I were missionaries serving on a campus north of Taipei. We made an early error (one of many) in our cultural understandings which led to Naomi’s daily presence in our lives. In Taiwan, we experienced people asking us regularly “Have you eaten? Have you eaten rice today?” Unfamiliar with cultural cues, we didn’t know this was similar to a western “Hey, what’s up? How are you?” Rather than providing a quick or non-committal answer, we would respond to the question literally and with earnestness, “No, not today.” This answer of course translated to them that we were hungry. This response repeatedly caught people off guard and led to many offers and gifts of food. I can only imagine the conversations that took place as the community wondered why we weren’t eating and if an intervention was necessary.
Enter Naomi, a middle-aged community librarian. Us being far from home, she worried about us. While her face was half-frozen from a stroke and brain tumor, I could see it in her eyes. If I were to be honest, while I was certainly getting enough to eat each day, we were far from home and I worried about us too. Naomi knocked on our door each day with a plastic bag in her hand and inside were large, delicious steam buns filled with meat or steamed vegetables, baozi.
She would show up at our door. She would say “Shangdi ai ni. Wo ai ni.” Translated: “God loves you, so I love you.” Her English was otherwise not strong and my Taiwanese was terrible. It was clear she would practice the words before coming. Like a ritual, a liturgy. A way of making meaning of the act, perhaps. Explaining her daily gift of food that took significant energy and sacrifice to make.
Those warm bundles of sacrifice felt like love, felt like manna in a wait and see kind of time.
Wait and see can be difficult when our spirits or bodies are hungry. The second story that comes to mind is of another woman named Naomi, who was mother-in-law to Ruth in the Hebrew Scriptures. Set during the period before monarchs ruled in Israel, the book opens with the verse, “In the days when the judges ruled.” (Ruth 1:1). Biblical scholars identify this time in Israel’s history as a state of continuous decline, where people did whatever was right in their own eyes because there was no king in Israel.
Here we read of the story of Naomi, her husband, Emelech, two daughters-in-law and their husbands, Naomi’s sons. In the first part of the story, we read that Bethleman, which in Hebrew means “house of bread” has no food due to widespread famine. I wonder how things would have been different if the opening question was: “Have you eaten rice today?”
Journeying to Moab to find food, tragedy befalls the family as all the males in the family die, leaving no children and no financial security for those left behind. This context of the legal system working as they intended, judges effectively judging, and yet disaster upon disaster upon disaster strains systems of care, most especially for the widows and the dispossessed.
What were they waiting to see? What about the bread for the journey that we all need? Biblical mandates bring us to life, full life. In full life, we can’t not work for the collective good through the giving of tangible and intangible gifts. We are called back to wholeness, and making things whole.
These two Naomis who have blessed my life remind me during these wait and see times that indeed bread for the journey is needed, especially for those of us far from home–however we define home. May this liminal period, this season of stewardship be one where we are fed and where we feed others.
