Within the Pentecostal tradition there is an honored spiritual disciple known as “tarrying.”  It is a discipline that has its roots in the mandate given to the disciples at the Ascension of Christ, namely to return to Jerusalem and “wait for the promise of the Father” (Acts 1:4).  Tarrying involves waiting before the Lord in anticipation of Divine intervention.  To tarry is to plunge into that tension between the times, the tension between the “already” and the “not yet.”  It involves actively attending to the presence of God, yet patiently waiting for that mysterious biblical event known as “the fullness of time.”

Tarrying is an exercise of both restraint and action, and its dialectical energy creates the dual virtues of faith and hope.  To tarry is to wait, but it is also to seek actively.  It is to be at peace, yet there is longing.  Sometimes so deep is the longing that it can only be expressed in groans and sighs too deep for words.

In these days of instant messages and drive-through meals, tarrying is a rare and difficult exercise.  No one wants to wait for anything, including even God.  This “quick-fix” syndrome keeps us from experiencing epiphanies of grace within the mundane world.  It keeps us from the wonder and amazement of being there when everything comes together in that dramatic fusion of karios and chromos.  Our rush ahead in time keeps us from the upper rooms that beckon to us.  Our anxious and driven lives keep us from experiencing the wonder of Pentecost time.

I am the chief of sinners when it comes to tarrying.  It is difficult for me to wait for anything. It seems to me that God’s movements should be timed less by eons and more by seconds.  Nanoseconds would be preferable!  A few years ago I painfully experienced the wages of this sin, but my sin became an occasion for grace.  It was the grace of the guinea hens.

My husband, Jackie, and I like keeping guinea hens on our small farm.  They are good at eating bus, especially ticks.  Guineas make wonderful “watch animals.”  If a stranger drives up they will let our terrifying sounds, something akin to hysterical screams.  These fowl are not known, however, for their maternal instincts.  For this reason, if we want guinea chicks we have to incubate them.  The first time we incubated eggs we really did not know the gestation period for guineas and we forgot to keep a record of when we began. Every day we would turn the eggs, and it seemed that as time passed these guineas would never hatch.  Finally one day, tired of patiently waiting and turning the eggs, I remarked to Jackie, “These eggs are never going to hatch.  They will soon go bad.  Let’s dispose of them before they start smelling.”

So we gathered us the eggs, and Jackie took them to the edge of the pasture.  One by one he began to throw them over the fence.  One by one the eggs broke apart, and as they did so, tiny guinea babies began to cry and flop around in protest of their traumatic premature entry into the world.  Horrified at what we had done, we ran and gathered up the chicks.  Some were already dead, but a few were alive.  We took those and gently placed them back into the incubator.

I knew that the guinea chicks would not survive the afternoon.  Their cause was hopeless.  There too injured and too tiny to survive.  Yet in a morbid mixture of fascination and guilt I stood watch over them.  As each one died I removed it from the incubator, apologizing for my misdeeds.  Finally only one little chick remained.  This little one had spunk.  Over and over it seemed to come close to the precipice of death and willed itself back to life.  I noticed that if I stroked its tiny head and called to it, the chick would attempt to rally, almost as if to say to me, “I’m trying you know…stay with me.”  I hovered there over the incubator, stroking the tiny head and whispering encouragement to the chick.  We were bonded in its struggle between life and death.  Finally, however, the struggle became too much and the chick died.  I cried not only tears of loss, but also tears of the penitent.  My own sense of timing had caused these chicks to die.

I learned a great lesson that day.  There is a fullness of time that cannot be hurried.  Life and death have their own mysterious rhythms.  We can only tarry before them, watching and waiting.  So it is with the ways of God in history. For years the children of Israel longed for deliverance from Egyptian bondage, then one day, one ordinary day, the I Am spoke to Moses from a burning bush.  For long centuries Israel longed for the coming of Messiah.  Anna waited in the temple, praying night and day, for Emmanuel to come.  Simeon tarried before the Lord with groans too deep for words.  Then one day, one ordinary day, the angel Gabriel came to Mary.  The post-resurrection disciples longed for the coming of the Spirit to fill the void left by the ascension of Christ.  Then one day, the Day of Pentecost, the Spirit came and felled them with comforting fire.

The longing for the fullness of time runs deeps within all creation.  At the present, the whole created order is in a tarrying mode.  We groan together for the coming kingdom, for that day when war and famine and disease will be no more.  Until then we attend to the presence of the Spirit who came to us at Pentecost and who is even now brooding over us like a mother hen, incubating life in the face of death.  Let us not grow weary in this time of incubation.  Let us find ourselves in an upper room and tarry awhile.