“Don’t Wait for Your Plane to Crash”

In 1972, a rugby team from Uruguay was traveling on a plane that crashed in the Andes Mountains in snow and subzero temperature.  They were stranded for 72 days. There were 45 on board.  Only 16 survived. Many here will remember the story. I was 10 years old at the time.  A new movie is being released about their experience, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the crash.  Recently, I watched an interview with one of the passengers who survived, Roberto Canessa.  At one point, he and another man decided to risk hiking out to find help.  They did.  As his life progressed, Roberto went on to become a pediatric cardiologist.  In the interview he talks about how the experience and his surviving it changed his outlook on everything and everyone.  He travels sharing his story, and everywhere he goes, he concludes with the same thought.  “Don’t wait for your plane to crash to realize how lucky you are. Be grateful for your life.”  

“Don’t wait for your plane to crash.”

You ever wonder if we do that?  “Wait for our plane to crash?”  Here’s another way to put it.  You ever find yourself waiting till the last minute when it comes to the important things?  Changing our ways—the ones that we need to change?  Our faith life?  Taking things like life itself, other people, and my health for granted?  A lot of us, if not all of us, have had our personal “planes” crash, if you will, and then we woke up.  Then we looked at God and said, “I’ll never do it again,” or, “I promise—I’ll do better.”  

We wait to the last minute on a lot of things, sometimes out of necessity.  The scriptures of the Advent Season, however—beginning today—urge us to not do that when it comes to matters of life, faith, and people.  The Gospel passage today is very short and to the point.  Jesus ends with a very direct statement.  “What I say to you, I say to all.  Watch!”  Watching and waiting in the scriptural sense is quite different from the watching and waiting that we do in everyday life.  It’s ironic, I think, that we’re confronted with this during the time of year when we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  We wait on packages.  We, perhaps, wait to receive cards in the mail. We wait for the semester to be over. We wait on exam results.  We wait in lines.  We wait on gifts. And so on.  All of this, while a part of life, is what you could call “worldly waiting.”  It’s the kind of waiting that we often get upset over—too upset.  Then there are those who are “watching and waiting” with their loved ones at their bedside.  They wait in their home.  They wait in a retirement community, perhaps.  They wait in I.C.U. in a hospital.  They will all be the first to tell you that, in that kind of waiting, you have to wait with the Lord. You have to wait in and on God’s time.    

How good are you and I at waiting—worldly waiting and biblical waiting?  Over the next few weeks, scripture will place before us several persons struggling with learning how to wait in and on God’s time.  The shepherds. The angels. The Magi.  And, of course, most significantly—Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.  If we want to know how to “wait with God,” as you could put it, just look to Mary. She knew what was coming.  She knew what her child would grow to be.  But patience never left her heart.  She probably looked to God and said, “Yes, it will hurt, but I know  you are with me.”  

Can we be like that?  Can we be like that in everyday life and not just when the really bad things happen?  

Again, let’s not, “wait for our plane to crash.”