Continuing in Advent, Dotti Ozolins preached from Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12. She begins with her own family history of learning to wait for God…

I come from a family where hard things will come but miracles happen.

These stories are richly ingrained in my psyche and my identity. My name itself means “gift from god” and is a reflection of my mother’s long history of infertility. My mother had been trying to get pregnant for over a decade, had surgery and fertility treatments. They were on their last round and looking into adoption when they found out they were pregnant with me. This began the family belief that hard things come but miracles happen.

When I was eight or nine, my little brother got really sick. World class pediatric cardiologists and neurosurgeons debated my brother’s case. His primary doctor gave him one diagnosis, but a different doctor disagreed and approached my parents about treating my brother for what he believed the diagnosis was. The second doctor was right, and my brother became the oldest person diagnosed with this rare heart condition, was treated and has suffered no long-term consequences from his ordeal. Hard things will come but miracles can happen.

In middle school, my mother got sick. I can still remember sitting in the school bus and watching the ambulance pull up to my house. She had an ordinary cold and her eardrum burst, allowing the illness to enter her brain and go into her spine, a diagnosis of pneumeccocal meningitis. By the time she got to the hospital, she was in a coma. statistically, her rates of survival were less than 1%, and those who do survive don’t do well. People across the country dropped to their knees and wailed out to God on my mother’s behalf, and she credits her survival to their prayers. My mother spent a long time in the hospital and even longer in recovery, but in the almost twenty years since then, her only long-term effect is a little hearing loss in the ear that burst. Hard things will come but miracles happen.

So when I started having severe digestive pain, it didn’t shake my faith. My faith was never centered in the idea that things would be easy. I didn’t believe in a world where we sailed through life unscathed. I had to do my part and be patient and trust that God would do what God does…

Over a decade, two colonoscopies, visits to every doctor who ends in -ist, invasive tests, and a million medication options later, my pain hasn’t gone away. My hard thing has come, but my miracle hasn’t happened. So, in my darkest moments, I ask, “I know that hard things will come but miracles happen. What is God waiting for?”

“What is God waiting for?” is an eschatalogical, Kingdom, capital-Q Question that I think we can all find ourselves asking sometimes. It’s theodicy, the question of why a good God allows good people to suffer. It’s the question of why systems have continued to perpetuate violence and racism and poverty and sexism and homophobia. It’s the question of freak accidents and terminal illnesses and climate change. Believing in the Kingdom of Heaven insists that we trust that the God of the Universe will make wrongs right, will burst in to heal our brokenness and pain. And so, when we find ourselves with the short end of the stick, when it’s been all hard things and our miracle has yet to happen, we turn to God and we ask, “God, what are you waiting for?”

Hear these words and more in the audio below.

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