Beauty of Waiting
Feb 20, 2026 | By Mitchell Schultz UT Austin ‘27
A lot of life is waiting, some good, some bad. The eager anticipation of jumping out of the darkness for a close friend’s surprise party is an exuberant waiting that boils and bursts like a pot set too hot on the stove, giddy in its mischievous love. Waiting can be arduous, like the newly married couple that grows into a not-so-newly married couple as they try faithfully and diligently for children of their own. The farmer’s long wait for rain to return to his drought-stricken plot of land and the fisherman’s patience in awaiting a bite are different waits that stir up distinct feelings. So too do the old man’s countdown to a well-deserved retirement and the child’s electrified sleepless Christmas Eve. Waiting is a beautiful and inextricable part of our life on earth. There is a push in modernity to cut out wait times– fast passes, same-day shipping, and streaming services are indicators of our cultural obsession with making things instant. Waiting, characterized as inefficient, is a pain point identified by aspirational startup founders every day–perhaps every minute. But the beauty of waiting is clear through the sheer breadth of human emotion it spans.
There is a time between the diagnosis and treatment of a serious medical condition where a period of waiting lies. Receiving a diagnosis– noticing that something is wrong, finding a reputable doctor (covered by insurance!), scheduling, and attending an appointment– is hard work in itself, requiring a recognition that something isn’t quite right and a concerted effort to try to fix it. Once diagnosed, the doctor will set a treatment date and give general orders to get plenty of rest, plenty of sleep. There might be physical therapy involved, or special foods to eat or stay away from, or even exercise regimens to prepare the body for surgery. There are plenty of action items to keep you busy.
But a creeping feeling begins to pervade. It’s a feeling characterized by a painful revelation that something inside you is broken, and you can’t do anything at all to fix it. You can certainly act in accordance with the goal of healing: physical therapy or dieting might help the cause in small ways, but it will not reconstruct an ACL or kill fast-replicating cancer cells. You need a surgeon.
This is a tough feeling to feel. We like to have at least the illusion of control, through our routines and our five year plans. Acknowledgement of such a disruptive reminder of our own mortality shatters any vestige of control that we might have, so we either ignore it, believing that our rituals and routines can really make us better, or we feel apathy, questioning what the point of the doctor’s orders are if the only thing that will fix what is broken is the surgery. It is incredibly difficult, because of our paradigm of control, to accept that our rituals have a minuscule impact on our healing and to do them anyway. We don’t cause our own healing by obeying the doctor’s orders, but we align ourselves with the one who does. So the waiting continues, anticipating the surgery while dutifully carrying out the routines of surgery preparation.
For Christians, this is what Lent is. It’s not a time for New Year’s Resolutions, where we try to make ourselves better through our own willpower. It’s a refocus on our diagnosis: remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Our resolve to improve cannot produce a meaningful change by ourselves, but it can bring us into the Doctor’s office, where we can rely on Him to fix our brokenness. The day of complete restoration is coming, but in the meantime, we reflect on the Doctor’s orders and how we are failing in following those orders, pivoting away from those vices, not to fix our brokenness, but in faith that God’s hand in our restoration is far greater than our own.