It’s forty days after the world-changing, history-making, earthshaking news of the groundbreaking event of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. For nearly six weeks, Jesus has been showing up alive and showing off to many believers, convincing them that it isn’t just their imaginations running wild that makes them not want to give up on Jesus after the cross. It’s that the grave really did give up the dead for the first time. Something new in the history of the world had happened: it wasn’t something that came from the mind of humans; it came from the hand of the divine and made them wonder, “If this is true, what else might be possible?”

And now, just when they were getting used to having Jesus around again, he left them again—this time disappearing into the sky as if a cloud came down and swooped him away. It’s in the creeds, you know, that we believe this strange thing: … on the third day he was raised from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty, whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. Most of our faith attention is focused on Easter; the ascension gets little notice. In fact, some of us are so bumfuzzled by it we would rather preach on mothers today than the ascension. I will resist that urge, however, because I know you don’t expect me to explain everything, only to proclaim the gospel. So what is so important about this that God included this in the gospel storyline?

It doesn’t seem to me that Jesus’ mode of transportation to God is all that important. I mean, Elijah went up in a whirlwind, riding in a chariot of fire, for heaven’s sake, and we don’t have Chariot Day in the church. (Don’t get any ideas.) Some people also think this passage tips us off to end times, because the angels tell the gawking disciples that Jesus will come again in the same way he left—literally, out of a cloud he will appear and return to earth. Some say that it will be right there on the Mount of Olives. So they are keen to reclaim Jerusalem in preparation for the Second Coming. I can’t drink enough Tropicana to get up for that sermon.

So some attend to the going and some to the coming. What about the in- between?

The disciples are disoriented. They don’t know what to think, how to feel, what to do next. They followed Jesus, clinged to him in love, despaired at their own desertion of him, marveled at his raising, thrilled at his forgiveness of them, clinged again to him in love, and now—well, now what? They are in transition again. Everything they thought they knew about life has been challenged. The props have been kicked out from under them. They wobble through life in wonderment where once they marched in regiment. Confidence gives way to cowardice, and now before courage can come again, there is this time of caution. This in-between time. This meantime.

How do we manage these interims between what we have known and what will be known? Life is full of them, isn’t it?

Mothers, you know a lot about this. There were halcyon days with your husband, days when it was just the two of you. You were footloose and fancy free, you two. And then something or Someone put it in you to let that go. A baby was put into you. And for nine months you lived off balance. The whole thing made you sick at times, made you feel the joy of womanhood at times, made you big and beautiful at the same time, gave you that glow, don’t you know?! Gestation, we call it. You can’t rush it; you can only wait on it, take it a day at a time, cherish what is when you can, endure what is when you must. Always you live in hope of the appearing, of the day when everything will change again and a new presence will grace your days. The baby comes, and you quickly realize that from the moment she is born, and every day from then on, you are in perpetual transition. There is no settling down, no holding on, no stopping the clock, no matter how cute the child is.

Life is one transition after another. Life is one interim after another. For mothers and for the rest of us, too. School. Work. Church. Neighborhood. Beliefs. Relationships. Cultures. Denominations. Bodies. These are just a few of them. Some are normal lifecycle types—passages, Gail Sheehy calls them; others are jarring, gut-wrenching transitions that come without warning, uninvited, unwelcome. Divorce. Diagnosis. Death.

What can we learn from this interim time of the disciples with Jesus? I would like to tell you just to go about your business being witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. But that would be premature. Jesus didn’t rush them right out of their grief. The time wasn’t right yet.

I would like to tell you just to get on with it, to change your attitude about what has happened. I would like to tell you to adopt the temperate wisdom of Rudyard Kipling in his poem “If”: … if you can meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same/ … you’ll be a Man, my son. But as much truth as we may find in Kipling’s measure of a man, the man Jesus was far more passionate. He would be closer to the passion of the romantic poets than to Aristotle’s golden mean of moderation. He would meet Triumph and Disaster with an open, beating, and bleeding heart rather than a cool, calm, and reasonable mind. Triumphs have to be celebrated. Disasters have to be suffered. Triumph and disaster both call for our fullest faculties and deepest emotions.

So Jesus says to wait. Just wait. Wait for the promise of the Father. Wait for the Holy Spirit to come upon you with power. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t do anything much. Just wait. Seize this time.

The disciples want to know whether Jesus will at this time restore the kingdom to Israel. Listen again to the key verb: restore! They are stuck still in past dreams, so stuck that they do not know how to dream new ones. And maybe they are afraid that if they do, if they forget how life once was, they will dishonor the people that lived that past life with them. The ones that walked that way with them. The ones that started the company. The ones that gave you birth. The ones that built the church or the denomination.

Others are stuck stargazing, like the disciples at the end of the passage. They are preoccupied with the future and are frozen in the present. Neither option will do.

Something new is happening in many churches that are without a pastor. They are going through what has come to be known as an intentional interim. That is, instead of just getting supply preachers to fill the pulpit or even an interim pastor who will just do the job for the meantime until the church finds another pastor, they call someone who is trained specifically to perform an intentional interim. An intentional interim pastor will under no circumstances become the permanent pastor. He or she knows how to help the church go through the steps to health after the former pastor’s time is past. Churches are often disoriented in the interim. They have come to know themselves one way, with one kind of leader—for good or ill. By being intentional during the interim, they take stock of themselves as church and are better ready for a new leader and a new day.

I was flipping channels recently and stumbled upon the very-underrated 1993 movie Groundhog Day. Bill Murray plays TV weatherman Phil Connors. He goes to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, for the silly ceremony that will tell whether there will be an early spring or six more weeks of winter. Phil the weatherman finds himself stuck in some sort of time loop: he keeps reliving Groundhog Day over and over and over again. Every day he wakes up in the same hotel bed on February 2, and only he remembers that he has lived it many times. The story involves how he deals with this in-betweenness, with this stuckness in time. He goes from bewilderment to maddening frustration to the realization that he can actually do or say anything he wants to and never pay the consequences, because he will always wake the next day to do the day over. But after doing everything he can to manipulate things in order to make out with a woman or to make off with money, he wakes up to himself. He realizes that this time is a gift, and he needs to use it in ways that honor the time he has rather than the time he has lost or the time he hopes he will find.

He begins to take piano lessons from a music teacher who is continuously surprised at how proficient he is, since she always believes it is his first lesson. He learns how to be an ice sculptor, which is the perfect art form for him, since everything he does will have melted away when he wakes up anyway. He becomes more generous. He begins to think about how he can help others and change their futures with his special knowledge. He saves a man who is choking on his food, because he is able to anticipate it. He catches a child who falls from a tree … every day.

Before long, a woman he hasn’t longed for before claims his heart and begins to console him. Slowly, he goes through a transformation. Having suffered himself, he is able to sympathize with other people’s suffering. Having been isolated from society, he becomes a local hero in Punxsutawney. He comes to grips with where he is and who he is. And when he gives in to love—the unexpected and unconditional love of a woman he wasn’t looking for, and the love he surprisingly finds for Punxsutawney and its people—he wakes up at last a different man on a different day. Says one reviewer: The curse is lifted when [he] blesses the day he has just lived. And his reward is that the day is taken from him. Loving life includes loving the fact that it goes. [Rick Brooshiser, senior editor, National Review.]

I don’t know why Jesus made the disciples wait for the Holy Spirit to come upon them and empower them to live again. I really don’t know. But I have to believe that God is not absent in those meantimes of life. God is only present in quiet and patient and concealed ways. I don’t know if we need times like that, but I know we have them. It seems wise to be intentional and creative and reflective in our waiting on God.

Mothers know this better than the rest of us. The rest of us must come to know. There’s no time for that like the present.