With real-world events getting more and more terrifying and dystopian, I am drawn to the lure of hope and wistful for a sense of joy.

With mounting human injustice, my first response is to remember the 1970s song by Jim Strathdee.¹ It says, “What we do while we wait depends on what we’re waiting for.” That’s my experience, too. If we’re expecting eventual doom, we will act in ways that help our human network increasingly unravel. But what if we are waiting for the Kin-dom of God?

I admit, God is my foundational reality. So I trust (most of the time) that all of life ultimately lies in God’s hands. But I also know people have free will and can have plenty of this-side-of-death power if they choose to destroy others or to self-destruct.

Yet when we come to the end of time—or when it circles around again—God will still be in charge, loving us and faithful despite our often twisted efforts.

Enter Rev. Rachel Mann’s August article in the Christian Century. Toward the end she says,  Even if I am being naïve, to come before the living God as one who waits in wonder and awe is a wiser and truer way of being than that of waiting in anxiety and impotence.”²

She finishes that thought by saying we can find joy in acknowledging that Christ was and is and is to come.

So our gathered personal acts against injustice and for compassionate belonging can add influential quality to our “waiting” for God’s vision for us all.

At some point, this age certainly will pass away. In the meantime, as Mann says, “We are called toward joy.”

1 – “Waiting for the Kingdom of God” by Jim Strathdee, published by Strathdee Music. https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/waiting-for-the-kingdom/7810927

2 – Rachel Mann, “Holy Impatience,” Christian Century, August, 2026,38.