2020: The year the whole world was forced to wait

We’ve had to wait.

As I assess my friends around me, though, many of us are waiting on more than only the day when this virus no longer impacts everything from the health of those dearest to us to our grocery shopping to our monthly paychecks.

I, like you (I suspect), have a deeper layer of waiting. Another waiting room that’s more personal … costly … painful, running simultaneously to this world-wait.

And this isn’t my first wait. 

As I look back on my earlier wait, I see this theme that emerged from a handful of friends: why keep hoping?

I might translate their question of me to: why voluntarily stay in this pain?

I heard it spoken over my marriage years ago, from a friend wondering if I should re-consider our covenant when things got especially tough. Another voiced it, curious about why I would still pray for God to enable me to conceive and carry a baby after we had adopted children. And another, feeding my impatience during our prolonged adoption process by suggesting quicker alternatives stateside.

Essentially: why stay a minute longer in this pain when there might be a way out? One of the biggest challenges of walking through our infertility and marriage struggles was a world around me that wanted me to be over it already.

But as I face another waiting room of a different kind (alongside the rest of the world, also waiting), I can’t deny that we Christians have formed a life-fight against the very place where hope — real hope — is birthed. (Read Romans 5:3-5)

In our exuberance to stop the waiting pains, we shortcut how God comes to those who wait. We shortcut what happens in the painful wait.

Let me tell you a story.

Several Sundays ago at church, one of our oldest children (one of the children we adopted) inched toward Nate, wrapped her arm around his waist, and rested her head against his chest. For many of you parents, this is your commonplace. Perhaps even just hours before you read this, an older child found her way to your lap, or a son put his arm around your shoulders in a seemingly inconsequential reach for affection.

But on that Sunday, this was not inconsequential. Nate swallowed tears. And I still can’t think about it without awareness of God’s intimate move within our family.

You see, we’ve been waiting.

I have this child’s name next to dozens of verses in my Bible that I’ve prayed for her, the pages watermarked with my early-morning, desperate (and often anxious, exasperated) tears. We have years of circumstances vying for us to believe that trauma scars irreparably — makes one incapable of receiving deep love. “How long, O Lord?” (Psalm 13:1) isn’t a verse I just read — my breath knows this prayer as if I initiated these words.

And so one, small movement like what happened a few weeks back and my mind dances around what is possible with God, instead of swimming in impossibilities.

My bent isn’t optimism. Dread fights to be my life companion. But, people can change in the waiting room.

There, you start to look for Him (out of desperation, let’s be honest), and your crazed-eyes shift away from that for which you’re waiting. Over time you detect what His eyes see: the microscopic, the inconsequential.

Lately, I’ve noticed more squirmy Christians — people, wired like me (like you?) — wanting something, anything to make them pain-free, to enable them to get from point A to point B quicker, to solve the ache of the waiting room. We call it “victory” or “efficiency” or “breakthrough”, colloquializing the pain-free life as favorable and, in so doing, shaming the moments where growth happens slow and progress tarries.

And perhaps I notice these people because I no longer can be them. I can’t claw myself out of this wait.

I’ve known both sides of the pendulum — working fiercely to avoid pain or living under the despair of waiting. But I land here: there’s a slip of a girl with little notoriety who, when asked to carry the savior of the world in her girlhood frame, immediately responded, “may everything you have said about me come true” (Luke 1:38).

Grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents passed to this girl-child a posture of waiting for the messiah, such that when she heard the call out of waiting, the expectancy of God — the intimate knowledge of God’s ways with those who wait for Him — rushed through her guttural response.

When pressed, one day, I want to have her response … to know, so personally, what the lilt of His voice sounds like, the soft, distinctive way He comes to people like me who sit and wait, to say with my life: “whatever you want of me, God.”

If you’ve been counseling your friends to not stay a moment longer inside their pain, irritated by their inability to get to the other side or learn the lesson. If you’ve been mumble-coaching yourself to just get out of this, already — to stop struggling, to get to the other side of this and soon: perhaps there’s a third way.

I promise it’s longer.

It may not be well received.

At times it might be excruciating.

And it’s full of life.

But those who wait on the Lord

Shall renew their strength;

They shall mount up with wings like eagles,

They shall run and not be weary,

They shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40:31

In the wait, also,

Sara

PS. This is an appetizer. If you poke around my SOAR substack, you’ll see that I take a deeper dive on subjects like this one for those who raise their hands as ones who want to hear a bit more.