By Norris Burkes May 15 2026
This week, I have yet another confession to make.
I am terrible at waiting.
I’m the guy who refreshes his email seventeen times hoping a response will materialize through sheer force of digital will. I’m the one who opens the oven door every four minutes to check on a casserole that plainly needs forty-five. My wife, Becky, has taken to calling this my “spiritual impatience,” which is a very gracious way of saying I sometimes drive her absolutely crazy.
So it was with more than a little irony that I recently found myself sitting in a clinic waiting room. Don’t worry. I wasn’t the patient. I was acting in my volunteer roll of driving veterans to their procedures at local hospitals.
His appointment was a routine outpatient procedure. The kind where they tell you to arrive at 7 a.m., and a chipper nurse hands you a thin cotton gown and a beeper and says someone will be with you shortly. Shortly, in hospital time, apparently means sometime before the next presidential election.
So I settled in for the wait, sitting down next to a man I’ll call Gerald. He was a barrel-chested fellow in his seventies, wearing a Vietnam veteran’s cap and reading a paperback western so worn the cover had separated from the spine. He had the easy stillness of a man who had learned somewhere along the way that anxiety is mostly wasted energy.
“First time waiting here?” he asked without looking up.
“I’ve been here a few times,” I said.
He smiled. “It’s just that you’ve checked that clock eleven times in twenty minutes. I counted.”
I laughed, caught. I asked what he was in for. He told me his wife was in surgery. Knee replacement. Third hour. And there he sat. Calm. Reading his western. Occasionally closing his eyes.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked. “The not knowing?”
He set his book down and thought about that the way men of a certain generation think about things — slowly, and without apology for the pause.
“Used to,” he said. “I spent most of my life trying to outrun what I couldn’t control. Then Eleanor got her first diagnosis eight years ago — different thing, all resolved now — and I learned there are rooms you just have to sit in. You can’t fix your way out. You can’t schedule your way around them.”
He tapped the worn cover of his book. “So I read westerns and I pray and I trust the doctors know what they’re doing.”
I thought about what he said for the remaining hour and forty minutes I sat in that room — yes, I eventually stopped watching the clock. Mostly.
There is a moment in the Gospel of John where Jesus arrives at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. He already knows what he is going to do. And yet, standing before the grieving sisters and the weeping crowd, Scripture tells us simply and strangely: Jesus wept.
He didn’t rush past the grief to get to the good news. He sat in the waiting room of human pain before he opened the door.
We want the stone rolled away. We want the resurrection without the Saturday. We don’t like that in-between day when the disciples sat in locked rooms not knowing what came next.
Gerald’s Eleanor came out of surgery just as they called my name. He stood up, folded the corner of his page with the care of a man who intended to finish what he started, and walked toward the recovery wing with the unhurried dignity of someone who had learned that love means showing up and waiting well.
Maybe that’s the waiting room gospel: presence, not productivity, is what most of us need when life sends us behind those windowless doors.
I’m still working on that. Ask Becky.
Join me in driving Nevada County veterans to their medical Appointments. To volunteer, call (530) 265-1446.
Join me for Sunday worship at Community Church in Nevada City at 10:30 a.m., 300 Main St. Read all my columns at www.thechaplain.net or send comments to comment@thechaplain.net.
