You expect waiting to feel like a held breath. Suspended and temporary. A corridor between where you are and where you are going, something to get through on the way somewhere else.
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. For the body to improve, for the anger to lift. For the morning when you wake and the first thought is not the loss. Years, in some cases. And the waiting has stopped feeling like a corridor. It has started to feel 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 less easily, in the middle of a service or in a well-meaning conversation afterwards, is the person still carrying the same thing they were carrying last year, and the year before that.
Paul never promises that faithfulness shortens the wait. He promises formation, which is slower and harder to want. "Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope" (Romans 5:3-4). The stations along that road are unglamorous, and none of them feels, from the inside, like spiritual progress. Perseverance feels like exhaustion. Character feels like being worn down. Hope, when it finally comes, arrives as the quiet realisation that you are, somehow, still here.
Still here counts for more than you think. After everything the waiting has cost you, still here is one of the honest forms of faith the Bible knows.
A particular grief belongs to the waiting. You grieve the life you are not living. The Christmases that have passed without the prodigal at the table, the future that keeps not arriving. Nobody tidies that away for you, and you are not failing by feeling it.
The life you are living while you wait is your actual life. The people in it are your actual people. The phone call you took while you felt empty. The coffee brewed on an ordinary grey morning. None of it is a warm-up for the real life you keep expecting to start once the news finally changes. The waiting is part of the story, not a blank stretch before the real chapters begin.
And the God who is over the waiting is not watching from somewhere far off. He is in the room, and he has been in the room the whole time.
The road is long. You are not walking it alone.
