I’m experienced at waiting. I know how to wait with God for things that feel like they’ve been promised and haven’t come. Well, I say I know how to, and what I really mean is that I know what it feels like to live in the between, hanging suspended between hope and hurt.
If I knew how then I’d be a much godlier man.
I wrote an early version of this that told a story about my life and my waiting, it was a cathartic experience to write but I don’t think it would be right to share with you. There’s a truth that I’m learning about who does and does not deserve my story. Most Christians, in my experience at least, are not open enough about their hurts and pains. Sometimes as a pushback people suggest a really radical ‘vulnerability’ that’s just plain unwise: you shouldn’t have anything in your life that you’ve told no-one, but nor should you tell everyone everything.
I’ve told people things I shouldn’t have, and they took the shards of them and stuck them in my back. That’s friendship, of course, the hopeful fear that you trust another with enough of your own mess that they could hurt you. Beautifully, when friendship blossoms, they instead trust you with some of their pain too.
I suspect that everyone reading has a wait of some sort, caught between what we hope for and what seems to be. Even if we narrow it down to just godly desires, I’d take the bet that every Christian who isn’t all shiny and new knows something of the pain of that eschatological tension. Others will be marked more deeply by it.
The dreams you have for your life, for things to accomplish, for your community, or for your church, are important. It is painful when we think that they’re given by God and then they turn to dust under our shoes. Their success is not a sign of whether they are indeed God-given, but that’s a bitter pill to swallow when all you’ve got is broken bricks. Living with the uncertainty and the waiting to see what, if anything, will come of them is painful. It is, I’m afraid, the human condition.
If, dear friend, your shadow is full of graves then the waiting takes a shape in your life that is unavoidable. We live in the time between, after Christ’s resurrection but before our own.
Everything will be made new, but it hasn’t been yet.
This is one of the reasons I find observing Advent to be helpful, despite being in the sort of tradition that looks confused about the liturgical calendar and suspects that Advent is 24 days of chocolate eating to loosen up the belly for Christmas.
I find staring into the darkness, acknowledging the finality of death—as well as considering judgement, hell, and the return of Christ—to be an appropriate warm up for an actual feast. The best place to feast in this between age is in the presence of enemies (Psalm 23), joy comes when we laugh despite all the horror. Why can we laugh? Because however unlikely it seems, Christ is King.
Sometimes I feel like an Advent man in a Christmas world.
Tish Harrison Warren, in her book Liturgy of the Ordinary writes about the grace of waiting. She has this little phrase that has stuck with me: “the waiting is the gift.” We think we’re waiting for the gift, but the waiting is the gift. In the waiting we learn to turn to the God of all Comfort, the God who is our food, the God who is broken for us. We learn to long for the age to come. Waiting reorientates our disposition away from this fleeting moment to the eternities to come.
The Christian life is one of waiting. We stand between the ages, pulled taut between the time in which our feet stand and the one in which our hearts live.
You might be surprised to hear me extol Warren’s words. What about my waitings, my ash, my broken dreams, is a gift? There are days that if you said that to me, I might channel Santa and punch you in the nose.
I’ve taken those words and plastered them on the wall above the desk at which I write. They sit there, brooding, accompanied by other phrases which prick and cut the heart with difficult truths. Perhaps I am a glutton for punishment. Perhaps a fool. There I days that I hate that I chose to place them there.
Yet I believe that they are true. That somehow in the mysteries of God it is the case that waiting is the gift. Waiting is a grace. Longing is joy.
And resurrection day is coming.
Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash
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