As the New Year progresses, we often find ourselves waiting.  We wait for signs, we wait for checks, we wait for work, we wait for admission, we wait for adventure, we wait for romance.  And much more.
     In his famous play Waiting for Godot, playwright Samuel Beckett tells the story of two people, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait for a person named Godot who, in true absurdist fashion, never comes.  Though Beckett's play has been subject to a variety of interpretations, one of them seems to center around futility, the futility of existence.  What if we wait all our lives for something that never comes?  What have our lives been for?
     Waiting for something that, eventually, comes can be hard, but waiting for something that never comes is vastly more so.  Yes, we will wait for things all our lives.  That is the nature of living in a broken and finite world pervaded as it is by an air of infinitude.  But if we wait for something that never comes, and if we make that something the most important thing in our lives (particularly if we know that it will never come), we indeed drown ourselves in futility.
     On the other hand, if we do not wait--ever--we may miss the point.  Implicit in waiting is hope, and implicit in hope is the stuff of existence.  As the apostle Paul asks in the eighth chapter of his letter to the church at Rome, " . . . for who hopes for what he already sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it."  Why?  Because we know and believe it is there.  It is our hope that drives us forward.
     So we wait, and we hope, the world before us and, we trust, never against us.  But we do not really know for sure that we can.
     Unless there's a God.