State of waiting
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As always, my hope in writing is that you will find yourself reflecting and growing and doxologising with me.
Lately I have been finding it rather ridiculous when I hear ‘season of waiting’ (or any of its semantic relatives) come out of my mouth. For those who are already cringing, not to worry: I have since struck this less-than-helpful fixture of Christian-ese from my personal lexicon. Does it qualify as a ‘season’ if it surpasses three months? Six months? Several years? Decades? With which of the many overlapping kinds of waiting shall we begin?
It seems more sensible at this point simply to reckon with the fact that we are perennially waiting in some fashion or another. In fact, a swift path to certain disenchantment would be to wait (with all requisite irony) for waiting to end in this life. With a somewhat wistful sigh, I suppose I will swap ‘season of’ for ‘state of.’
The glaring mercy grinning through my sigh is that God loves waiting, has been pleased to structure it into existence within his good and groaning world.
Rather than launching into an unwieldy reflection on the nature of time in biblical perspective, I will instead comment on how I am coming to conceive of the task of waiting well. After all, we would be disastrously remiss to consider waiting neutral and necessarily passive. No, for there are stakes associated with how we wait, and one wishing to wait well must be girded for something strenuous.