Wait: Thoughts and Practice in Waiting on God
180
Wait: Thoughts and Practice in Waiting on God
180Paperback
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Overview
What are you waiting for?
Everyone has endured the endless traffic light, the queue that goes nowhere, the elevator music piped through the phone line. But what of those periods in your life when everything seems on hold? When you can't do the next thing in your professional or personal life because you can't get to it?
Waiting--be it for health, a life partner, a child, a job--can be an agony. The persistently unrealized goal feels like an endless road. And hope's constant deferment can be exhausting. A firm answer against the thing you're hoping for--"no"--might be easier than this constant lack of closure. It might be easier to give it up.
But what if waiting means to be something else? Waiting doesn't have to mean idleness. Our prolonged state of need might teach us to look beyond the desired goal to something infinitely better. We find lessons on this throughout the Bible and, if we are paying attention, in our own lives.
Rather than fostering frustration, periods of waiting might have great truths to tell us. It might show us that hope is worthwhile. Waiting might even be a gift in and of itself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611532746 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Torchflame Books |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2019 |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Nobody tells you when you get born here How much you'll come to love it And how you'll never belong here.
–Rich Mullins
We sat on the floor of my family's living room while my mother taught the lesson. She sat with us, holding up a poster she had made: a large drawing of a traffic light.
I don't remember what traffic lights were like in Japan, but a standard American traffic light would do. Most of the children in the room found it familiar enough that it worked as an object lesson.
My mother held Sunday school almost every week during the two and a half years we lived in Japan. I know that almost every gaijin child living in our small neighborhood came. Once we had an Easter egg hunt. Another time we enjoyed root beer floats. I'm sure that, weekly, we sang songs and read Bible stories and played a game or two.
But the only lesson I recall is the one with the traffic light. It was a lesson on prayer.
God answers our prayers, my mother said, and he does so in one of three ways. Sometimes he says "Yes" (the green light), and sometimes he says "No" (the red light). And sometimes — the yellow light — he says "Wait."
Not a flawless metaphor, but even as a young child, I knew how to weigh some of this. "Yes" is what we're going for. To my child mind, it meant getting what I wanted. And "No" I recognized as the worst answer — with the degree of disappointment dependent on what one was asking for.
But what of "Wait"?
That yellow light on my mother's poster surprised me. I was six years old. I can't claim much of my awareness at the time, but I know that I've never forgotten it — and I've forgotten countless Sunday school lessons over the years.
In truth, I can't remember what I thought about that lesson, except that the yellow traffic light — the potential "Wait"— made God seem more real to me. He was not, after all, like the automat in Maizuru: a machine operating just outside my vision, dispensing responses based on my input and desire.
After that lesson, I knew that God was something more than that — something I couldn't see and certainly couldn't understand. But he was clearly something more.
* * *
I've never heard anyone say that they enjoy waiting. Granted, people might enjoy meaningful ways to pass the time. But the waiting itself?
I'm not talking about waiting for a meeting to start, a program to proceed, or a train to arrive. In each of these cases, the wait might be long, but it has an established end.
No, I'm talking about that other kind of waiting — the one with hopes clearly in view and no practical way of reaching them. This kind of waiting is an endurance game, its players charged with energy, passion, focus, zeal — and nowhere to put them. In these scenarios, waiting is readiness snagged on inaction, all interest and ardor curbed.
Normally, readiness precipitates action; to delay the process from one to the next feels unnatural, at best. It can be painful. And often, the longer one waits, the more difficult the waiting becomes.
What are you waiting for?
I have a friend who is waiting to be married. She isn't in a relationship; no potential spouse crests her horizon. But she wants that partner in life, that significant other who prefers her above all else. To reference the brilliant When Harry Met Sally, she wants a date on national holidays. Her friends are getting married, and her calendar is marked with bachelorette weekends and bridal luncheons — all for brides who aren't her.
I have a friend whose husband needs a job. It's been several years now of living on unemployment and any additional money she can earn by caring for other people's children in addition to her own. She watches her husband in a mixture of hope and sadness as he searches the internet and goes to interviews.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be pregnant. Meanwhile, it seemed like everyone around me was joyfully announcing their pregnancies. I likely bought a score of pregnancy tests over those years; my husband suggested we buy stock in a pregnancy test company. I admired friends' babies in person and in Christmas photos. I imagined what our baby might look like. Month after month I was hopeful, and month after month I was disappointed.
That's the pain in waiting: we see what we want, but we can't get at it. Something is in the way.
* * *
I'm thinking back to the traffic light, to the two unpreferable answers it might give. We can't pretend for a moment that "No" isn't the most painful. When God answers "no," a world of hurt is possible, with questions and doubts rushing in that can occupy the rest of our lives.
But "Wait" has its own darkness, doesn't it? "Wait" can feel like silence or inattention from God, and the lack of a timetable is agonizing. We might sometimes prefer a definite "No" to waiting's endless uncertainty.
My friend, a single mother, was going through a difficult time with her young son. This was years ago now, and as we sat together and watched our children play, she told me about their struggle. She put into words what I had felt countless times, and what I had heard so many other faithful Christians say as they waited for God to release them from their holding pattern and into that greener pasture just visible over the rise.
"I want it to be over," she said. "I just want to learn whatever it is I'm supposed to learn from this so that we can get on with a normal life."
A normal life doesn't seem all that much to ask for, does it?
Beyond the poster and my mother's instruction, I remember nothing of that Sunday school lesson when I was six. I don't remember what wisdom she cast around God's potential answers to our requests.
But knowing my mother, and knowing what I've learned about waiting over the years, I can guess she had something to say. I think she might have told us that waiting is worth waiting for. That my friend, who wanted to learn what she needed to learn, wasn't entirely wrong to say so.
* * *
Whether or not she was aware of it, my friend had already learned the first lesson of waiting. But this lesson is difficult to note, simply because it's so obvious. To the one waiting it seems less like a lesson and more a bald — and unhappy — fact.
How so, you say? Well consider for a moment my not-engaged friend who collects wedding gowns on Pinterest, or the twenty-something me squinting for non-existent lines on the pregnancy test. Consider again the friend mentioned above, who simply wanted to get back to a normal life.
The first lesson of waiting is that we are on the outside. We are separated — indefinitely and utterly — from that thing we desire.
Despite its being obvious to the one waiting, grasping it is also essential — less because it helps us with the wait, and more because the wait, whatever it may be for, is a metaphor: All of us are on the outside. Separated from what we want. In exile.
This might not seem true, of course. This actually might seem patently untrue. You might be happily ensconced in a loving family, a marriage, a tight-knit circle of friends. You might belong to a country club or a sorority, a church, a civic group.
But just as is true of those who wait, the human condition is actually that of being on the outside, an unhappy state that poets have noted since the world has had poets. Exile is true of all of us, but we manage to ignore it with all manner of distraction: wealth and possessions, meaningful or frivolous activity, even what is truly good and beautiful.
The problem is that you can't contend with something if you ignore it. And this fact of our exile — the fundamental state of all human existence — is not going away.
Waiting can teach us this.
* * *
In July of 2001, we had three children, ages 4, 2, and 4 months, and the small start-up my husband worked for had reached the end. In the space of months, the significant investment the company had received was spent; there was nothing left.
They kept him as long as they could. We had watched in fear over the preceding months as one after another of his colleagues was let go. Daily we waited for the ax to fall in our direction.
When it did, there was no severance pay, no extending health insurance. The job-hunt my husband had already been pursuing for months yielded no employment and very few hopes — all of which, after months of conversations and professional persistence, dried up completely.
Two months later, the events of 9/11 had an understandable but terrifying secondary effect: hiring freezes everywhere. My husband's Masters degree in business from a top graduate school, his experience in international marketing, his practice in the world of current and rising technologies meant nothing.
Fear, in this context, was an understatement. How would we house, feed, clothe our children? How would we meet their needs for vaccinations and doctors' visits, those necessities even for healthy children at that age?
And despite being part of an economy in which this was happening to others, despite knowing it had happened to Bill's colleagues, we nonetheless felt very much alone. Occasionally we had reports of others' circumstances: so-and-so had found a job; this family or that was moving for employment; he was now working for this company, she for that. Over the ensuing months and years, the life-line that is steady employment — a given for so many — was never thrown our way.
Meanwhile, job loss simply wasn't happening to our friends or even most people we knew. I watched them with awe over things I had once taken for granted: a regular paycheck, the capacity to buy basically anything one was needing at the grocery store. Doctors' visits. Car payments.
We were waiting for a job that never came.
It works as a metaphor: We were a family of five. Two children by the hand and an infant strapped to my husband's back, all of us on a train platform. We were staring through the sealed glass doors at the passengers safely inside, and there was no getting in.
* * *
If you have asked God for something, and he has not said "Yes" or "No," if you are among the loved ones enduring his seeming silence, if you are standing on a proverbial sideline or platform somewhere, then I am asking you to shift your gaze.
Don't stare at the train. Don't squint at the stick. And don't think for a minute that, just because I ask you to shift your gaze, the thing you are gazing at — the thing you want and are waiting for — is bad.
But there is something to be gleaned from the waiting itself — and this is what we must attend to right now. You are on the outside, looking in. But look around you. Everyone is on the outside, and this has been true from almost the very beginning.
* * *
In my most recent teaching position, my students and I studied the Genesis creation and fall narratives. Along with them, we looked at some artistic renderings of that early and pivotal moment, Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit.
As you might imagine, visual portrayals abound. Michelangelo rather famously included this story on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. His tempter — half woman, half twining serpent — provoked a good deal of conversation in my classroom. We also looked an engraving by Durer, in which a cat makes to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse just as soon as Eve bites the apple. But perhaps my favorite in that study was the one that lacked these rich narrative details. It was Masaccio's fresco, a tall and narrow image entitled Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
The painting is limited by its location, confined to one of several panels at the entrance to the Brancacci Chapel. As such, the artist included only the essentials to tell the tale. So we have Adam and Eve moving away from the garden, a space marked by the fronds of a single branch and a gate's arch. Above and behind them leans an angel, sword in hand, driving them away. During the Renaissance, worshippers at the Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence would have known the narrative at a glance: Adam and Eve, tempted by the serpent, have succumbed to sin and now are banished forever from the Garden of Eden.
Despite its simplicity, Masaccio's Expulsion provided us with good fodder for conversation. We talked about his use of light and classical representation of the human form. We noted the near-contrapposto of the figures in motion — that Adam and Eve are almost twisted in their posture. But most discussed were the expressions of pain. Adam's shoulders are hunched, his head bent, his face buried in his hands. In contrast, Eve's face is inclined upward, but her eyes are closed, her brow wedged in distress, her mouth hanging open. While other renderings of this moment demonstrate interest or fear, anger or shame, the dominant expression here is one of grief.
Which perhaps explains why it was my favorite among the works we studied. As one who had attended Sunday school my entire life, and as students attending a Christian school, we could sometimes neglect the weight of biblical narratives. But in Masaccio's skilled treatment, one can't overlook Adam and Eve's experience of loss. This separation between God and humankind is nothing short of exile. Here is the origin of that isolation and rootlessness common to human experience.
* * *
My students, astute observers and — most of them — fairly well-churched, were quick to notice what they perceived as an error: Masaccio's Adam and Eve are naked. This works in both Michelangelo's and Durer's depictions, which portray the pair at the moment of the fall. But here they have been expelled from the garden. Why did he portray them in the nude?
Perhaps it was the influence of classical art. We also discussed another potential aim: their nudity figuratively emphasizes their shame and vulnerability.
But it reveals yet another important aspect of loss in this story.
When Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, they were clothed not in the fig-leaf coverings they had made, but in "garments of skin" made by God. We get no further detail, but the underlying necessity is, of course, death: some animal had to be killed in order to cover Adam and Eve's shame.
And so here we see a further repercussion of sin: in those terrible moments of chastisement, the punishment falls on human and creature alike; both the people and nature will suffer: "Cursed is the ground because of you" (Genesis 3:17), God says. So the dust of the earth becomes the embodiment of death; the loss will permeate even the finest elements of the material world.
* * *
In many ways, nature rather neatly absorbs death itself, redeeming decay by converting it into fertility and compounding it to form coal; bringing new growth and life in the wake of forest fires, tsunamis, and earthquakes. But no matter your take on the story of Eden, the curse is evident everywhere. The earth, says Paul, is in bondage to decay. We see this less in nature's absorption of death and more in chronic flaw: distortions of how things ought to be, brokenness.
Beyond what mankind brings on through exploitation or mismanagement, nature itself is embattled. Shifts in weather patterns — long before climate change — brought famine and flooding. As promised in Genesis, farming has always been subject to these challenges as well as to thorns, roots, and rocks in the soil. But the problem is more deep-seated: the natural world meets corruption at molecular levels: an alteration in a single gene can shorten a life or encumber it with suffering. Diseases morph, vexing doctors and defying countless hours of scientific research.
Creation "is subjected to frustration" (Romans 8:20), Paul says. It groans.
* * *
So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3: 23-24).
Here we read what Masaccio illustrates: God prevents his beloved people from returning to the garden and, in the process, prevents their access to the tree of life. I wonder if there aren't two mercies here.
The first is stated. In choosing independence, humankind has chosen the way of pride and the self. Access to the tree of life in this context would mean the unbridled promulgation of that selfishness, which would mean eternal lives of struggle and despair. In this view, the flaming sword is protection: God protects people from themselves.
But again, I think there is a second mercy. For Adam and Eve — and all mankind — banishment from the garden means no chance to revisit it. Memory alone will inform our sense of glory lost and the beauties of that innocent place. Of what it meant to walk with God in the cool of the day.
When we are waiting for something — be it for marriage, a child, or a normal life — we can see what we're after. It's just beyond our reach, just through the train's waiting doors, if only they would open. But the exile of our souls is utter expulsion, wandering, a sense — if we are paying attention — that we have permanently lost our home.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wait"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.
Excerpted by permission of Light Messages Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Praise,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Contents,
Dedication,
Introduction,
One — Exile,
Two — Home,
Three — Expectation,
Four — Expectancy,
Five — Worth,
Six — Ask,
Seven — Trust,
Eight — Praise,
Nine — Watch,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Works Cited by Chapter,
The Author,
Also by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson,