After the latest storm of a lifetime, we are all chock-full of stories.  Of course, most of them are not much different than the stories of all our friends and neighbors who have just lived through the same storm.  This makes it hard on those of us who aspire to be raconteurs.  Unless you want to risk being a bore, your audience for snow stories is essentially limited to out-of-towners.  Fortunately, as a preacher I have a high risk tolerance for boring my hearers and readers. 

No one could say that this storm caught anyone off-guard; there was plenty of noise about it in the media.  People said it could be another “Snowvember.”  That didn’t really register with me.  When the “Snowvember” hit Western New York in 2014, I was still blissfully enjoying my sojourn in that paradise that is South Carolina.  At the time, I saw the storm as an opportunity to lob smart-Alec texts at my family here in the frozen tundra.  I had no real appreciation of the scope of a storm like the one we have all just been through.

Even if I had lived through the 2014 storm, I still might not have been too excited about the forecasts I was hearing.  After all, we have all heard many predictions of storms that turned out to be far less than advertised.

Arriving home from work on Thursday, I thought, briefly, that I should top off the gas can in the shed which I use for lawn mowing and snow blowing.  But as I settled into my grandpa recliner, the impetus for going back out in the dark to get gas faded rapidly.

After the first 4 or 5 hours of snow-blowing it began to occur to me that I might not have enough gas to keep up with the never-ending supply of snow falling on the driveway.  Even though I had my driveway clear, the (dead-end) street I live on was not plowed.

This was my dilemma in a nutshell: I couldn’t stop snow-blowing the driveway or I would never be able to clear it again, but if I kept snow-blowing, I would run out of gas with no way to get more until the plows came down my street.

Never have I looked so fervently for a plow to come down my street.

And I kept looking.

And looking.

And looking.

When I poured the very last ounces of gas into the snow blower, I felt like a desert nomad tilting the last drops of water from an empty canteen into my parched mouth.

In the nick of time a front-end loader made its way down the street, and I immediately scooted out to get a full tank of gas for the snowblower.

Waiting is hard.  It is especially hard when you desperately need what you are waiting for, and you just can’t supply it yourself.

Advent is like that.  We are waiting for every mountain to be leveled, every valley to be lifted up, and the rough places made a plain.  We wait with deep longing for a promised Kingdom of peace.  We’re shoveling and praying and peace-making, but most of all, we’re waiting for the One to arrive who can do what we cannot.

Prayer:  Thank you for every reminder of need, every anxious worry that reminds me to wait in hope for something far greater than a clean driveway.  Amen.