This is from a commissioning sermon delivered to assistant pastors; I thought it perfectly fitted to  our current series, and a good word not only for those of us called to care for others, but for all of us who think of ourselves as Christ’s.

To begin with, you [as pastors] are called to be waiting companions. Companions in the long art of patience and waiting. The worst depression I ever suffered was brought on partly by a sense of guilt that I had moved my very musical family to Canada, only to find that we couldn’t afford music lessons for them, and couldn’t even afford a piano. I had never lived in a house without a piano, or gone many days without playing it myself, and my heart despaired at the thought that I had unwittingly cut my young children off from making music. Then, after about a year, in which one level of depression had led to another, a wise friend who was moving house phoned me up and said he was going to sell me his electronic organ. ‘I couldn’t afford it’, I said. ‘I’m going to sell it to you for One Dollar’, he replied. I drove round there and put it in the back of the station wagon that afternoon, solemnly writing him a cheque for One Dollar (I think he wanted to tell his children, ‘I sold the organ’). We installed the organ in the living room bay window, and I got out my old book of easy Bach pieces and found a chorale prelude almost at random, and played it through. ‘That was nice,’ said Maggie from the kitchen. ‘What’s it called?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and looked back to the start of the piece. There it was, the answer to my waiting, the answer given by a gentle companion at the right time. The chorale was called ‘God’s time is best’. And my then eight-year-old son, who started organ lessons that summer, was playing the organ last Friday night when I licensed the new vicar at Wolsingham.

God’s time is best; and all counselling involves enabling people to wait for that time, even if they wouldn’t call it that. But the difference in being a waiting companion within a Christian framework is that we know there is a God who does have a ‘time’.