Waiting for the right time, can feel like everything is going wrong.

The sacrament of waiting can feel the hardest of all.

You can bet on it these days, every morning when we rise and look at the calendar, we think: How long, Lord, how long?

How long till parts of our story turn around, how long till our tender hearts mend, how long till there’s healing in a deeply fractured world, how long till we all get to breathe even a little bit easier?

The sacrament of waiting can feel the hardest of all.

They say waiting is the drumming of impatient fingers.

Or the unbearably slow watching of the face of the clock, the long sitting in front of indifferent calendars that have minds of their own, and you keep hoping for something to heal the hurt in your heart.

Hoping can feel so much like hurt.

Hoping can feel so much like hurt.

But, the brave and battle-weary will flat-out tell you:

If you’re waiting in front of a stretching calendar, waiting beside a hospital bed for any kind of stirring, waiting for the word you need to finally turn off this endlessly-stretching dead-end road, waiting for change that is moving slower than old molasses frozen in the depths of December, you know waiting isn’t an uninvolved twiddling of thumbs because you have felt it:

Hope is a buoyancy — and waiting is what splits you wide open to fill with the rising waters,  so everything can rise. So you can rise.

Waiting is a herculean widening of everything within you into a canyon — that can fill with a rising ocean of hope.

Hope is a buoyancy — and waiting is what splits you wide open to fill with the rising waters,  so everything can rise. So you can rise.

Waiting isn’t passive — waiting is passion: waiting is loving long enough to suffer.

Waiting is the patience of the long suffering of letting go. Letting go of the plan, the dream, the map, the vision. Letting the ground of things, the things that you made your ground, letting them give way.

Waiting is a letting go to let something grow.

Waiting is a letting go to let something grow.

The combine is waiting out in the farm shed, waiting for the wheat harvest to come. 

The Farmer stands at the front window in the early morning light, waiting for any rain clouds to move in from the west.

His Bible is open on the sill, like it’s a rail shielding him from the edge of things in a world that’s tilted in all kinds of ways. Our early hours can all be the same, day after day, before the throne of grace: our hands may seem tied, but our knees never are.

His eyes hardly ever leave the sky. Will we get enough sun, enough rain, will we get enough of what we need? Frost will be here by early to mid-September. You only have so many days to grow a crop, to grow hope.

And those empty squares on the calendar are always harshly blunt. I try not to think how so much of this year has been waiting. Hoping. It can feel like hope is running out.

His eyes looking toward the west, over the wheat, the Farmer speaks soft: 

“This is not about us growing a crop — but about God growing us.”

All this waiting isn’t destroying us — the waiting is growing us.

The waiting is widening us — so Hope is never running out —  but more hope in Christ is running in.

Waiting isn’t loss — it’s enlarging.

The longer the heart waits, the larger the heart expands to hold the largeness of the abundant life.

The waiting is widening us — so Hope is never running out —  but more hope in Christ is running in.

Waiting is a kind of expecting — expecting to have the capacity for hope and pain and love and life all expand.

Nothing is lost in the waiting process — because waiting is a growth process.

 I turn toward the sky and feel it:

Nothing is lost in the waiting process — because waiting is a growth process.

Waiting is gestating a greater grace.

Waiting is the sacrament of the tender surrender, the art of a soul growing large.

Because the waiting process is a growth process, the secret to waiting with hope, is the same way any plant grows toward hope:

  1. Water with the Word,

2. Turn toward the Son,

3. Root the soul deep in Christ (with the praise music cranked, with jotted down verses, with meditating and memorizing Scripture)

4. Get all your nutrients from daily paying attention to all the ways He loves you, instead of paying attention to all the ways life hurts you.

5. Stretch outward, stretch out your roots toward Christ and community, stretch out into a lived-posture of connected cruciformity,

The waiting process is about how we embrace a growth process.

And it’s true, even here: 

Life has no waiting rooms — life only has labor and delivery rooms. 

Waiting rooms are actually birthing rooms and what feels like the contraction of our plans can be the birthing of greater purposes. 

All our waiting for more — is growing us into more.

The Farmer only pulls on his farmer’s cap when he heads to the barn, out past his waiting fields, out to his waiting mama sows. His head’s bowed low into gusts of wind blowing in, and God’s ways coming down.

Waiting is the sacrament of the tender surrender and this is the art of a soul growing large. 

Every waiting moment is heavy with the weight of glory and all our waiting delivers a fuller life.


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