Nobody tells you that waiting has a texture.
You expect it to feel like a held breath — suspended, still, temporary. A corridor between where you are and where you are going. Something to get through. What you do not expect is that the waiting would become, after long enough, simply the shape of your life.
For some of you, the waiting has a name. You are waiting for the prodigal to come home. You are waiting for the body to improve. You are waiting for the grief to ease, for the anger to lift, for the morning when you wake up and the first thought is not the loss. You have been waiting, in some cases, for years. And the waiting has stopped feeling like a corridor. It has started feeling like a room you live in.
The church does not always know what to do with long waiting. It is more comfortable with the before and the after the crisis, and then the testimony. What sits uneasily in the middle of a service, in the middle of a small group, in the middle of a well-meaning conversation, is the person who is still in the middle. Still waiting. Still unresolved. Still carrying the same thing they were carrying last year, and the year before that.
If that is you that I am writing to.
The New Testament does not promise that faithfulness produces short waiting. It promises something quieter and harder. That in the waiting, something is being formed. Suffering produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope. The movement is slow. The stations are unglamorous. None of them feel, from the inside, like spiritual progress. Endurance feels like exhaustion. Character feels like being worn down. Hope, when it finally arrives, feels less like a sunrise and more like the quiet realisation that you are, somehow, still here.
Still here is not nothing. Still here, after everything the waiting has cost you, is one of the most honest forms of faith the Bible knows. And there is a particular grief here. A grief that belongs to the waiting. The grief for the life you are not living while you wait. The Christmases that have passed without the prodigal at the table. The future that keeps not arriving. This grief is real and it deserves to be named. You are not wrong to feel it. You are not failing by feeling it. But here me.
It is your actual life. The people in it are your actual people. The small faithfulnesses of this week. The morning quiet time, the phone call taken while you felt empty, the brewing of coffee. All these are not the warm-up. They are the thing itself.
The waiting is not outside your story. The waiting is part of it.
And the God who is over the waiting is not watching from a distance. He is in the room with you. He has been in the room the whole time.
The road is long. You are not walking it alone.
