Waiting

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?

The father in the parable does not appear to be doing anything when the son returns. But the text suggests he has been watching the road for a long time. There is something to be said about what that watching costs — and what it means.

The hardest thing about waiting is not the length of it. It is the silence that comes with it — the feeling that the waiting means something about you, or about whether God is still there.

Waiting is not the pause before your life resumes. For the wounded believer, it is often the place where the most important things quietly happen — whether you notice them or not.