The older I get, the less confident I become in some ways. I sometimes wonder whether I’m following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ. These words from Fr. Ron Rolheiser echo with many followers of Christ. He goes on to write that to be human is to be inadequate. Only God is adequate, and the rest of us can safely say: Fear not, you are inadequate! But a God who made us this way surely gives us the slack, the forgiveness, and the grace we need to work with this. I take consolation from the gospel parable of the ten bridesmaids who all fell asleep while waiting for the bridegroom, wise and the foolish alike. Even the wise were too human and weak to stay awake the whole time. Nobody does it perfectly, and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even healthy humor about it. The Eucharist is, among other things, a vigil of waiting. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist, he told the disciples to keep celebrating it until he returned again. I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return. The biblical scholar Gerhard Lofink puts it this way: The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in the Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ to return. The Eucharist is our gathering point in our waiting for the Lord.