Waiting

It is eleven o'clock and you reach for the screen instead of a friend. The AI chatbot is relational sugar. A fast, sweet spike that cannot rebuild what is torn. You close it, and the room is exactly as empty as before.

You have wanted a sign that you are not a failure. David asked for one too in Psalm 86:17. But the sign he named was not power or rescue. It was that God helped and comforted him. Your stubborn survival is the sign.

The lie of suffering tells you that your collapse is unique. You are on the train, or in the supermarket queue, and everyone else looks untouched. They are not. You are not alone in your boat.

Heman was a chief musician of the temple. He led worship for the king. By every external measure, his life was working — and he wrote one of the bleakest sentences in the Bible. Darkness is my closest friend. Part one of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Psalm 124. A song sung after the danger has passed, after the floodwaters have gone down. The whole psalm is a backward look — and it asks a question of us we almost never stop to ask.

Most Christian teaching on waiting assumes you know what you are waiting for. But the reality is less clear. You are waiting, but you have no promise about what is going to be given.

Jesus prayed on the night before he died. He asked, three times, for the cup to pass. The cup was not taken. This is the most important unanswered prayer in the Bible.

The silence of God is not the same as the absence of God. It does not feel that way when you are inside it. The prayers no longer reach anywhere, the Bible reads like a closed door. The feeling is real. The conclusion is not the only one available.

We have been taught, quietly and persistently, that tears are something to move through on the way to something better. What if they are not the waiting room? What if they are, sometimes, the sanctuary itself?