I have a confession to make: I am not very good at delayed gratification. I haven’t told my parents this yet, but almost every year when I was growing up I knew exactly what I was going to get for Christmas well before the actual date, because when snooping, if I found a box or a bag, I took a good long look at the contents, inventorying what was probably mine and what was probably my little sister’s. I was a sneaky little kid, too, putting everything back exactly as I found it so that my parents could be none the wiser. I wasn’t sad about this on Christmas morning either. I didn’t care that there were never many surprises.

I was reminded of this habit recently when a friend sent me some of his writings to read, and I promised to save them for airplane reading when I went to Atlanta. But I didn’t; how could I have all that good reading material in my office at home and not dig into it? I recently got a book of daily devotions, meant to be read one day at a time so that they will last the long months of summer and fall. I’m in the middle of July right now, and the books I was saving for my long, four-airport flight to Birmingham on Friday? Done.

You can hardly blame me for this deficiency in being able to wait. Waiting’s hard. I just celebrated Mother’s day, my birthday and the anniversary of my ordination, all in the span of three weeks. I have to wait eleven months until there is a day set aside that is special, just for me. By February, I’m going to be climbing the walls for some sort of celebration. No, when there is something to look forward to, I am anything but patient.

I’ve been thinking about why this is lately, why it seems so very human for us to be impatient, to eschew delaying something that would make us happier, even if waiting would prolong the happiness. There are ways in which we try to train our children to wait for gratification, to help them understand how “the real world” i.e. the cruel harsh world, works. Even our pets—I have been trying to convince Tanner to wait longer and longer, to sit quietly in the spot that I tell him to sit for a longer and longer period of time before I give him his dog treat. I tell myself that it’s to teach him self-control, but he’s a pretty well-behaved dog, so maybe its really to teach me self-control.

The dominant culture in which we live used to support this idea of delayed gratification, but I think we have seen that this is not the case anymore. When 20-year-olds are given credit card applications, and start having visions of all the ‘stuff’ that could be charged—visions the credit card companies are all to happy to encourage—well, I think we can agree that we are not living in the age of delayed gratification.

For some of us, our inability to wait might stem from some rather unpleasant memories of what it is to be surprised. For some, the surprises of our lives that have had the most impact on our understanding of how the world works have not been happy ones. Many times, surprise turns our world upside down. I’m thinking of that snowy night when I learned that my parents had been seriously, and in my mother’s case, permanently injured in an automobile accident, and the early September morning less than a year later when I heard that my best friend’s father had been killed in a freak farming accident. Sometimes when surprise shatters everything that we know, we stop wanting to be surprised, and we start looking for that which can reassure us in the short run, even if it means giving up longer-term satisfaction in exchange for shorter-term happiness—or something that looks like it.