By George Pence (guest contributor)–
It is November 16th and our family is still incomplete.
We first realized in March that two of our number were missing. Yet so many months ago that absence was still preliminary. The promise that our separation was temporary became a source of reassurance.
“What’s the matter of a few months?” we thought.
But now the unrelenting fact of their absence drags on. The passage of a week feels like a month, or a season. We wonder at the vagueness of when they’ll actually arrive. We knead each passing day like a rosary bead. Is today the day? Tomorrow? Or is this bead merely the first in yet another decade?
We chafe at the inexactitude of what is promised. We ask ourselves, “When they are finally here and we put our arms around them, who will they be? Has our anticipation created people different from whom they actually are? Are our expectations too great, too little, too different?”
“And when they see us will we be the family they were hoping to find? Will we be worth the wait of so many months spent in isolation and silence?”
Yes, my stepdaughter is expecting twins. Her last visit to the obstetrician came as a surprise. “I really didn’t expect to see you in my office” she said, “I thought we’d be meeting in the delivery room.”
The look on Gia’s face returned a multiple of that disappointment, because most of Gia is not Gia. It is her twins.
So all of us continue to wait, and inherent in that wait is the need to balance opposites – anxiety and hope, trepidation and curiosity, insufficiency and enthusiasm.
Suddenly our homes seem too quiet, our schedules too open and our arms too empty. Unopened bags of diapers stand like sentinels on guard over empty rooms.
We are the newest recruits in an airborne brigade. Anxiously standing at the precipice of an open door we anticipate something of tremendous consequence over which we have little control. A random breeze or a temperature gradient will soon be more persuasive than we are.
But that kind of jump is only a brief uncertainty solved when boots touch down on solid earth. This jump is into forever. Our airplane is gone, the earth is gone, and what happens next is no longer entirely about us.
And so we wonder, will today be the day?
(George Pence is a writer, photographer and resident of Salt Lake City. Most of his life has been spent outside of Utah in places as various Chicago, the Sierras and the piedmont of North Carolina. He is a Catholic convert who came to the faith as a college student at the University of Utah. In 2008, forty years after his conversion, he returned to Utah and again became a member of the Newman community at the University of Utah. There he has served on the Parish Pastoral Council and co-teaches a third grade Sunday school class. He is married to Glenda Fredrickson and they have six children.)
When my son was born, he had jaundice and had to be kept in the hospital for about a week. We would come home from visiting him and have to see his empty crib and all his clothes and diapers and formula. It was tough. But in time our family was all complete and under the same roof. It was worth the wait to be able to bring home a healthy little boy.