It’s winter in the northern hemisphere. January has turned to February, February will soon be March, and we’ll start looking for the first signs of springs. Daffodil greens … buds on the trees … the return of birds that migrated south. We’ll start looking, but the temperatures where I live will still be mockingly low. It’s cold. It’ll be cold for a while yet. Every day I’ll hope it’s a little warmer, and every day when it’s not, I’ll think, Will spring ever come?

I know it will. But when winter refuses to loosen its grip, it’s easy to forget. It doesn’t feel like spring is on its way.

This weekend, we’ll celebrate my son’s fifteenth birthday, so of course my thoughts drift back in time, to when I was, to put it biblically, “large with child.” I remember sitting at my mom’s birthday party, what turned out to be three days before Rowyn came, but still three weeks from his due date, and thinking, I am so uncomfortable. I need this kid to come soon. That pregnancy hadn’t been fun–I’d been sick the whole time, I hurt from my insides to my skin, and while the thought of actually giving birth again gave me a rather hilarious moment of panic, I also felt that impatience that pregnant women are rather famous for feeling. Is this ever going to be over? I want my baby NOW! We know that days in the womb equal health for the baby (most of the time), but even so. We’re impatient. We want to move from potential to actual. We want fulfillment.

We know they’ll come. The child in our womb will not stay in our womb. But it doesn’t always feel that way.

God, when He created the universe, created it with motion. We mark that motion and call it time. He made us that way, as creatures who live in time and rely on time. He gave us minds capable of dividing that time into smaller and smaller portions, down to nanoseconds … and into larger and larger portions, counting millennia and epochs. We can count it. But we can’t escape it. We are children of time.

And we’re impatient. We look at the march of seconds and hours and days and weeks and months, and always, we yearn for that next fulfillment.

We wait for things–and we don’t always wait well.

We wait for the next season. The next break. The next vacation. We wait for that promised child, the promised job, the promised raise. We wait for the healing we need, the new treatment, the answer.

We wait. And we resent the now that isn’t the then, when we have the thing we need or want. We stretch always forward, thinking the future a bright and sparkling thing, and we look back, remembering the past as something better than where we are. How long, Lord, we pray along with the psalmist. How long must we wait for You?

But we don’t serve a God who is slave to the motion of time He created, as we are. We serve a God who exists outside it, who looks on all of creation through all of time with omniscient eyes. He sees the then. He sees the now. He sees the was and the will be. He shapes time in His hands, sets us exactly where we need to be within it.

And He makes us promises.

I remember the days when my kids were toddlers. The span of their lives was so short–every day felt BIG to them. Every promise seemed to take forever to happen. “Is it time yet?” and “Are we there yet?” and “Mama, now?” were familiar phrases.

I remember a few snippets of those days from my own life. Do you? I remember being maybe four or five and visiting my grandparents. My parents were telling a story–I don’t remember about what–and they said it had happened a week ago. “It did not!” I remember yelling. “It was months ago!” It wasn’t. It’s just that it seemed so long ago to me, and I would have sworn–did, as a matter of fact–that it had been far longer than a few days.

How often is time, is fulfillment, is the promise skewed by our perception?

As I read through the Bible in a year last year, I marveled time and again at how this plays out in Scripture. God made a promise to Abraham. He promised him, first, a son. It took decades for this promise to be fulfilled. Decades! How many of us would be that patient? If a child is the deepest desire of our hearts and God had promised us one, would we just wait on Him to fulfill the promise? Or do we think, Maybe He meant I’d be a parent through some other means? like Abraham did.

God made promises to David, to the prophets, to Israel as a nation. He promised them a Savior, He promised that they would be the means by which the whole world was blessed, He promised them they would be His people and He would be their God. He made a covenant with them–far stronger than just a promise, than just words–and that covenant came with expectations. Things they needed to do–things He would do.

But it took time. Decades. Centuries. Millennia.

Is it any wonder, then, that Israel got impatient? That they forgot? That they slipped away? To their eyes, God was taking too long. He’d forgotten them. It didn’t feel like the promise was ever going to come.

Looking back from the 21st century, we know that it did. That He kept His word, gave His Word, and fulfilled His covenant. We know that in another blink of His eternal eye–whether that’s a day or another million years–He’ll fulfill the final promise of a Second Coming, of a New Heaven, a New Jerusalem. We know that eternity will overtake us and time will pass away.

But it doesn’t feel that way, as we’re struggling and striving against our own sins, our own limitations, our own weaknesses. Does it?

It’s never easy to wait. Not for the things we most need, we most yearn for. It’s never easy to be stuck in time and yet serve a God who is outside it. And yet … and yet there’s comfort there, too, really.

We can rest assured that what we mess up in the moment, He will redeem in the ever-after. When we can’t see the next step on the path, He’s looking on from above the maze, already knowing how it will turn out. When we think we can’t make it one more day, He already knows their full number and stretched them out just so for us.

We can know that those pieces we least understand will ultimately be for His glory; and that His glory means our good.

We don’t serve a God of the get-rich-quick, the instant-results, or the satisfaction-guaranteed. But we serve a God of eternal promises. A God of covenants. A God of His Word.

It isn’t easy. Neither is waiting for spring, or the arrival of that precious newborn, or the cure. But we wait, because that’s how He made us–creatures bound by time. We wait, and we learn, in the waiting, something more about Him. We learn what eternal means. And we learn, a little more, how awesome is our God.

God knows us. He calls us by name.

We know this. We can point to Scriptures that say it, we can recite it to each other. For that matter, I even sign each copy of The Nature of a Lady with “He knows your name.” I’ve printed it on tote bags. I’ve put it in a pretty font and positioned it within a lovely floral frame.

It’s true.

But that doesn’t mean we remember it. That we embrace it. That we live it.

We know that not only does God the Father know us and call us by name–our true names, the ones that reveal our true selves even more than whatever name our parents gave us could possibly do–but Jesus died for each one of us. We know that He loved each one of us enough to suffer on that cross. We know that He laid down His life for us. For you. For me.

We know it. But that doesn’t we remember it. That we embrace it. That we live it.

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I attended a daily mass on Wednesday night, like we always do. We listened to the beautiful Scriptures. We heard a beautiful homily on the importance and sanctity of life. And then we went up for communion. Father John was there that night, an older gent with white hair and a face that testifies to many years of smiles, of care. He’s relatively new to our parish, just joining the team of three in October. He’s still learning everyone’s names, but he knows ours because of some classes we’re taking–and he gets excited when he sees someone whose name he knows. His eyes light up, and he shakes our hands with a bright smile, saying, “Roseanna, right? And David!”

He’s been making a point of learning all the names he can. I can imagine him repeating them to himself, trying to pair names and faces of any of the 2,000+ families of parishioners in our area that he sees regularly. It’s a job! But the importance of it is clear. And became even clearer that quiet Wednesday night during the Christmas season.

Because that quiet Wednesday night during the Christmas season, when he was talking to us about the children murdered for Christ in Bethlehem upon Herod’s decree, when he was musing about the value of each and every life, what each individual can bring to his family, community, and world, when he reminded us all to mourn the tragedy of each young life ended not only then but today through abortion or neglect–that quiet Wednesday night, Father John held out the communion bread, looked me in the eye.

And he said, “Roseanna. The body of Christ.”

Roseanna. The Body of Christ. Broken for you.

Tears stung my eyes as I accepted that humble little wafer, said, “Amen!” and put it on my tongue. Because even though I’d known this truth for decades, it was the first time in my memory that anyone had said my name while giving me the body of Christ. And it made something quiver within me.

He calls us by name. He sacrificed His body, that same body we take in communion, that same body He invites us into as the Church, for us. For ME. As He was hanging on that cross, Jesus looked out over the centuries, into the eyes of each one of us, and says, “Beloved, this is for you.”

“Roseanna, I’m doing this for you.”

“Karen, I’m doing this for you.”

“Jennifer, I’m doing this for you.”

“Stephanie, Lynn, Elizabeth, Mary, Naomi, Karlene, Kimberly, Danielle, Kerry, Hannah, Pam, Shaleen, Arwen, Barbara, Jessica, Sandy, Rebecca, Caroline, Latisha, Melanie, Bethany, Candice, Cindy, Tina, Terri, Justine, Julie, Alyssa, Rachel, Halee, Bonnie, Nicole, Laura, Margaret, Betty, Deanna, Emily…I’m doing this for YOU.”

It’s a truth we know. But have we heard those syllables echo in our hearts? Down to our souls?

Do we live like it? Do we let it change us, not just once but every single day? Do we strive, in every hour, to become more and more like our Savior?

That quiet Wednesday evening during the Christmas season, Father John made it crystal clear that each life, each person, each name, each one of us is so beloved by our Father and His Son that He would make the ultimate sacrifice for us…and he also reminded me that we are called to be a sacrifice too. A living sacrifice, as Paul calls us–living, but willing to follow Him wherever He leads us.

Today, I pray that you savor that sweet truth on your tongue and in your heart. And I pray, too, that you accept His invitation to share that sweet truth with others.

Because He knows their name too. And He loves them. He loves them so much, that He stretched out His arms on that cross, looked across the centuries, and straight into their eyes too. He calls them by name. And He died for them.  Just like He did for you.