Lessons from Advent: When is it good to wait?

By Steve Matthews, Senior Missional Consultant

At FaithX, we are not so good at waiting.  It’s not that we are busy for the sake of being busy, but our mission is to help congregations survive and thrive in challenging times.   We take this mission seriously, and as coaches and consultants we want to discern and motivate our clients toward the actions that will best support a thriving ecosystem.  We can be very strategic and goal directed in an effort to motivate and embrace change.  But maybe, just maybe we need to slow down a bit.

The season of Advent reminds us that the world does not always operate on our timetables.  God will not be rushed.  Life emerges and often takes its own sweet time, just ask an octopus mother.

Did you happen to hear about the octopus mother discovered by the Monterrey Aquarium?

Mandy Len Catron writes, “In 2007, scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium sent an unmanned submersible almost a mile deep into the Monterey Canyon. The Monterey Canyon is just as massive as the Grand Canyon and at that depth it is an intensely hostile environment. The water maintains a steady temperature of thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The pressure is around 5,800 pounds per square inch. Not a single photon of sunlight can penetrate what’s known as the midnight zone. It is dark, cold, and crushing. And it was here, along a rocky slope in the vast darkness, that researchers came across an octopus with a distinctive crescent-shaped scar.

When they returned a month later, they discovered the same octopus (species Graneledone boreopacifica), with her same scar, perched on a clutch of milky, tear-shaped eggs. No one had ever studied an octopus brooding at this depth before, so every few months, when they revisited that part of the canyon, they stopped to check in on her.

It turns out that when a female octopus lays her eggs, it marks the beginning of the end of her life. She devotes all her remaining energy to polishing the eggs, spraying them with fresh oxygenated water, and defending them from predators. She stops hunting and, scientists think, stops eating altogether. She doesn’t move from her spot and her body slowly deteriorates until the eggs are ready to hatch. For a shallow water octopus, this may last a few weeks or even months. But in the deep, metabolic processes can happen far more slowly.

Visit after visit the researchers found the octopus perched on the cliffside, arms curled over her eggs. Occasionally, they would spot crabs circling, hungrily eyeing the brood. But all one hundred and sixty eggs remained. They even used the submersible’s robot arm to break off a crab leg and tempt her to eat, but she refused.

A year passed this way, and then another. The eggs matured. The octopus grew ragged.

On their last visit, a full fifty-three months after they first found her, the researchers identified the tattered remains of the egg sacs. When they looked closer, they spotted baby octopuses among the nearby rocks.”  The mother’s brooding time exceeded that of all other animals known to science!

I encourage you to read the full article by Mandy Len Catron in Ninth Letter.  It’s not really about an octopus.  The article is about her own long journey toward motherhood.  As she concludes the essay, she writes, “I want there to be a better way to talk about what we give up for one another, about how sometimes one must do what needs to be done, even when it is hard—not because it is beautiful or poignant, but simply because you are the one who can do it. To live and keep living, to see that others keep living too, to sustain a family, a species, a planet, this is difficult, necessary work. It is the work of care.”

So sometimes we wait for life to emerge, but like the octopus and like Catron, we don’t wait passively.  We pay attention, we care, we nurture, we do our part with all the love we can muster, and we trust that life happens.  For what are you waiting expectantly this advent?  How are you preparing with your heart, your home, your congregation, your community for the life that is to come?