Read by an AI voice
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
Hebrews 3:15
In the doctor’s waiting room, a small notice: “Respect and patience are not yet available on a drip.” We smile. Then we glance at our watch.
We know how to wait. We even spend our whole lives doing it. All week long we wait for Saturday; and on Sunday we are already waiting for the next Sunday. We drive fast because we are waiting to arrive — and barely arrived, we wait to leave again. At the cinema, some stand up before the end, as if they had come only to wait to leave. The soup is served, and we are already thinking of dessert.
We give the impression of believing that life is never now. This moment would be nothing; it is the next one that would count. We are not living: we are waiting to live. With existence, we always have appointments set for tomorrow.
And yet there are a thousand ways to wait. The supermarket queue, endured, where we grow irritable. The concert queue, chosen, joyful, where strangers almost become friends because they hope for the same thing. And those holding areas where a sign coldly announces: “From this point, thirty minutes’ wait.” A strange age, which knows how to measure the time it is about to lose.
For that is indeed the word we use: we kill time. As if it were an enemy. But while we think we are killing it, it is time that carries us away, gently.
The Bible knows this tension. It says two things that seem to contradict each other. On the one hand: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Hebrews 3:15). Do not wait for tomorrow. On the other: “Be patient until the Lord’s coming” (James 5:7). Our whole life, then, would be a waiting.
How can we hold both? The difference is not in the hour, but in the heart: waiting does not have the same colour depending on what we hope for.
The one who lives in impatience is always elsewhere — later, further off, never here. Christian hope does the opposite: because the end is certain, the present becomes livable. I no longer need to flee this moment: it is already held by Someone.
Then waiting changes its face. It is no longer the room where we grow impatient, watching the clock, but the queue of those who hope together, because they know Who is waiting for them at the end.
Jesus never said: “Now counts for nothing; wait for what comes next.” He said the opposite. Because of what is coming, do not wait: seize today. Live at once. Pour your soul into the moment.
For every minute of my time bears a name. It is called my life.