Today I'm still thinking a lot about what it means to wait . . .
My friend Sarah and I were catching up the other day on the phone. We’d hadn’t talked to each other in months so we quickly got down to the essence of what is going on in the ups and downs of our lives (I love these kinds of chats). In catching up I realized that we’re both waiting in different seasons of life for what is not yet and what we don’t know. While it was nice to make this connection that we're in a similar place, it's really not a fun state to be in at all.
For all of us who are waiting for something, we know how this feels.
The frustration of waiting can easily turn to anger, despair and life crippling anxiety.
When we wait, we can feel stuck.
When we wait, we can easily feel forgotten.
When we wait, we can feel like God is not close, but very far away.
A long term season of waiting can often turn us inward to the point that we think we’re the only person on the planet that has every waited for x.
But, we aren’t. We know this of course, but accepting it in our hearts is altogether different matter.
Yet, ultimately, waiting and hoping and not knowing in our waiting is a part of what it means to be human.
Nothing ever happens instantaneously. Often nothing good in our life comes without pain. Suffering through waiting finds us all.
We are not ever as alone as we feel.
Waiting in fact, can be a spiritual discipline that has the power to re-focus us on life-giving practices that sustain.
Waiting can turn our spirits toward other wait-ers—those who we might not otherwise encounter so deeply.
Waiting can humble the hardest places in us, even the place we didn’t think were hard at all.
Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that waiting is hard, hard work. It takes faith—faith like none other to sustain your spirit in a time like this. It takes sticking with yourself, even on the days when you think you can’t make it one more day. It takes trust: that the bigger picture is indeed worth the ride.
To my fellow wait-ers out there—whatever it is you are waiting for—know that you have a friend in me. This is the best gift I can give today.
I’m waiting with you, as I know through your reading of this post, you are waiting with me.
I hear your pain. Your struggle. Your longings. Your cries.
I know that sometimes there’s no other way to put it than to say that waiting sucks.
But, in community may we keep the faith. May we not loose heart. May we hold each other accountable to keep on waiting as the Hebrews writer spoke of faith: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."
