The line to get back into the United States was unusually long last Sunday. I had traveled to Tijuana to serve communion at El Faro: The Border Church. At church I made two new friends and together we grabbed a quick cab ride back to the border crossing.
I groaned when I first caught sight of the line, and I told my friends that we could be looking at two or maybe even three hours. But our good conversation made the time go fast, and the pedestrian crossing at the U.S. Port of Entry was fully staffed for a change, so in fact our wait was just an hour and a half.
Waiting is a funny thing. The emotions that waiting conjures are not proportional to the time - or at least not precisely. A host of things can come into play to make the waiting excruciating, on the one hand, or relatively painless, on the other.
Over one hundrend thousand people cross the border between San Diego and Tijuana each day - it is the busiest land border crossing in the world - and the half who are coming north typically wait two hours and more to gain entry to the United States. (My colleague Saul and his wife Bernice waited six hours to cross the border after church in Tijuana one Sunday... and they had three children in the car with them.)
Hanging out at Friendship Park, though, has a way of putting your own waiting in perspective. Since launching El Faro four months ago I have gotten to know a young man who had to wait five months to see his newborn daughter ... ... and a young mother who has now waited three years for her husband in Mexico to agree to a divorce (his refusal prevents her from bringing her daughters to live with her in the United States so she spends her weekends in Tijuana to be with them) ... and a young American soldier who is counting the days until his re-enlistment ceremony (he has asked his commanding officer to have the ceremony at Friendship Park because there is no other way his parents can participate).
I find it humbling to consider the sheer capacity for waiting displayed by these people - and millions of others living on the US-Mexico border. And with them I find myself asking, "How long, O God, how long?"
Their example causes me to consider more deeply why we wait. We wait because we believe ... or, more precisely, because we have faith. We have faith that the waiting is worth it, that the passage of time will bring changed circumstances, that somehow ... someway ... some day ... we will arrive at a desired destination.
Waiting and desire are like crazed lovers, inseparably intertwined. Or perhaps it is better to think of them as mother and child, a longing so human that we all know what it feels like, so natural that we all recognize, without having to think about it, its inherent virtue and value.
How long would a mother wait for her child? How long could a child sustain his desire for his mother?
I don't know the precise answer to these questions, but I know the answer is "longer than 26 years." How do I know this? Because that is how long it had been since this man (newly released from prison, I believe) had seen his mother, the woman on the other side of the fence at Friendship Park.
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| photo credit: Maria Teresa Fernandez |
O God, the ancients declared that "a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night" ... but Lord, we don't have a thousand years. So many of your people are separated from their loved ones, and without a loved one even a single day, even a single night, can seem a thousand years. So when the world gives to us times of waiting, give us strength that we would not be consumed by hate and anger. Give us courage instead to spend these waiting times shining forth the light of your love, and punching holes in the barriers that would keep your people apart from each other. Come, Lord Jesus, come ... come and satisfy our desires ... and with the passing of time may our desires more closely reflect your will. Amen.
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