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Waiting | Part 2

In the bleakness often associated with a season of waiting, there are sometimes lavish blessings to be found, perhaps all the more seen as such standing out against a backdrop of felt lack.

 

Even as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is dearth. We can be so attuned to what we desire that has not manifested that we come away starved from our own thought process, our vision narrowed by what has not yet appeared.

 

But lest we be a little too hard on ourselves for our own felt lack of patience, it bodes well to remember that it is sometimes referred to as “long suffering.”  The wise King Solomon also wrote: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”

 

So what do we do when we are waiting for a desire to be fulfilled? As noted last post, waiting is a verb—it is not necessarily an absence of activity or anything else unless we choose to frame it that way. And while waiting is a time of sublimation and the restraint of certain yearnings, it is key to remember during the moments we are bent in a manner we did not choose or do not prefer, we still choose how we wait.

 

Waiting can involve quiet rest or agonizing journeys into cyclical thinking that seems to get us further from the point than where we started.

 

However, if it is true that we can choose our strategy through the season of waiting, then we have several unplanned gifts in the form of tools at our fingertips. The first, again, is patience: “But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” (James 1:4)

 

The second tool is when the truth becomes part of us that we truly have power over our thought processes and emotions. While the decision to exert responsibility over our soul might be instantaneous, the practice and honing of it takes time–often, a lifetime. And yet, is worth every single second.

 

The final gift is the gaining of that which we have waited for—or the realization that we never needed it to begin with. Either way, the result is satisfaction. And in the meantime, we are allowed to enjoy contentment on the way to what we are waiting for. It certainly beats the alternative, as we all know too well.

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Waiting | Part 1

Wait: (verb) “Stay; remain: be.”

We sometimes equate waiting as lack, as non-action, as void. However, and speaking very much as one who does not like to wait, it is somewhat comforting knowing that waiting is an action. It can feel like so much less.  I am the person who will choose the two-mile road with no stoplights over the quarter mile road one with them. Yet, while waiting can feel like the hardest task we are called to, ironically, waiting times are resting times.  As someone who has historically had trouble slowing down, resting has been about as lackluster a concept to me as waiting. (I say “historically” as having young children has rather turned that on its head, however, and that elusive state known as rest is now seen for the glorious gift it is.)

 

Waiting denotes a pause, as does resting. And whether we find ourselves in the austerity of the desert or the lushest of oases, we can often be driven to either extreme simply in the quest for meaning.

 

For most of us, utter depletion, bone-deep exhaustion, or just a vague sense of weariness are not intentional stops along the way to completion of our endeavors, but that is where we are at times waylaid. Somehow, pacing ourselves did not work into the plan. Other times, our momentum slows to a creep when resources we’d counted upon are consumed.

 

What we sometimes identify as garden-variety impatience can have a deeper root: lack of trust. If we are honest, we feel like Sally waiting with Linus for the Great Pumpkin that never actually arrives. We do not wait for what we do not expect. If we do not trust, waiting is not only difficult, it is impossible.

 

What is interesting about the definition of waiting as “stay~remain~be” is that they are all synonyms for identity, and consistency. Perhaps we are shortchanging ourselves more than we know when we knowingly or unwittingly limit our chance to in a sense bake fully by resting adequately. Maybe that is in part what it means to be bread of life for others, even as Christ was: he himself had to “bake” by spending time in lonely places where he could commune with the Father before he could be broken, and given. How much more do we need to submit to the process of resting, in order to come into our fullness, so that we may likewise be given, and share the nourishment of a life renewed with others weary from their own journey.

 

When we are called to wait, we can rest in knowing God is doing something we cannot. As writer/speaker Reuben Welch once said: “When nothing is happening, something is happening.”

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Desert Awakening | Part 4

In the desert, we find ourselves in the crosshairs of existential quandary. The outlook is at once vertically expansive and yet, the trajectory we occupy, starkly limited.  A kind of felt paralysis takes place at such a crossroads, and yet, while it can feel stifling, it is necessary.

 

The cessation of our usual flow of life activities and the meaning we attribute to them is necessary to see what is around us, that in our sustained focus we have been unable to recognize. When we are in constant movement, our peripheral vision is compromised, and with it, our ability to see things in context.  Unplanned events and their interrupting power naturally hit the reset button, and place us in the desert for a season of contemplation and recalibration. Like plants gone dormant in winter, we can see it as a bleak and fruitless time.  And yet, it is a crucial time to taking steps forward in our next season of life.

 

For most of us, we do not initiate the stopping. Rarely, do we like the Desert Fathers and Mothers freely vacate into a “desert experience”. Rather, in different forms, life stops us: unexpected illness, financial crisis, family straits. We worry and wonder what the best path forward is when the known, tried and true becomes hopelessly rearranged. We sit among the puzzle pieces and wonder how and when things will ever seem integrated again.

 

This is the very ledge of transition: letting of go of what was, to embrace what is. We chafe at the sense the uninvited seems to already be embracing us, whether we want it or not. We related so long to a certain paradigm, it is bewildering to find ourselves in the midst of the new, and we struggle to reach back into what was familiar, if for no other reason than to simply find our bearings.

 

But there is purpose in the confusion, the annoyance, the frustration, and even in the devastation that can follow when a staid course becomes interrupted by the inevitabilities of life in a fallen realm. That purpose will manifest differently to every person – and yet, one constant remains. However indiscernible, the love of the Creator meets us in the austerity and envelopes us in arms capable of shielding us from the grief that would otherwise consume. Our inability to perceive this all-encompassing reality does not change the fact that it remains constant. But when we choose to acknowledge its presence, we begin to see that there is indeed a limit to time in the desert.

 

We can do nothing greater in our lives, in the desert or in the most lush of oases, than to pursue this Love.

 

As the desert path comes to an end, we will look back not at its pain, but at the gifts forged as a result of being there.  They are gifts both for the giving, and the keeping.

 

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Desert Awakening | Part 3

Desert times are without question not something we vie for. We tend to equate them with loneliness, desperation, and an abject misery that can leave us feeling foolish, clueless, and vastly unfulfilled.  It is true: sometimes our own folly leads us to wander in a place with little relief from the truths and attenuating realities that bear down hard like sun without a shade in sight.

 

And yet: deep and personal acquaintance with a poverty of emotional resources can nevertheless be a powerful teacher, and the equipping coming out the other side, an embarrassment of riches, if we choose to humble our preconditioned responses and accept a path of discovery. We find we begin to fit within our own skin with a greater readiness at such times, not trying to become something we were never intended, but simply, the awareness comes to the fore that who we were uniquely apportioned to be is actually who we’ve always wanted to be.

 

The striving to meet the expectations of others, often with a perceived spectre of disapproval glowering on our missteps and even best but at times failed attempts can be enough to get us off the path. We wander around in bitter terrain perhaps looking to someone or something to define us rather than risk exposing our limitations in the trial and error that is a requisite to any worthy undertaking. In the process, we don’t so much lose our way as lose ourselves.

 

And yet, even in the starkest moments of self-rejection quietly disguised as complicit behavior on behalf of others, a great conundrum runs alongside: we must lose ourselves to find ourselves.

 

Perhaps this is the doorway to hope written of by the prophet Hosea in words penned in response to a woman whose life had splintered in untold ways, deemed without remedy if not by those around her, perhaps to her own estimation of herself. The farther our wanderings from the core of whom we are made to be, the more prone to believing untruths of who we are, layered over our true essence. The voice of the Creator breaks the silence brought on by the wreckage of missed opportunity, deplorable choices and resulting denial. The voice is one of adoration, of seeing through our false layers to the glistening reality that lies underneath. It is the voice of worth, and it is the very sound of healing.

 

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor* a door of hope. *(Hebrew word meaning: muddy, turbid, gloomy, dejected)

 

We do not know this woman’s backstory and what led to lifestyle of destructive choices, but even if the storyline is not quite the same, perhaps we can hear the remedy to our own misadventures, whether past or present, echo through. It is the very language of hope, and renewal—based not on human critique, but on the wisdom that ‘mercy triumphs over judgment.’

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Desert Awakening | Part 2

Stepping deeper up into the canyon under cloudless blue skies, the gravelly path led past curiously shaped green succulents as tall as a man, placed at irregular intervals.  The dull dazzle of cactus spines pointed in all directions. A sudden flash of light across the dark back of a skink clearing the path disappeared almost as quickly as it was detected.  A mysterious and pervasive sense of something that was hard to identify breached my awareness of the austere terrain until I was stopped mid-step, taken aback by the most profuse quiet I’d ever encountered. The fact that it was out of doors made it seem all the more profound. It was if invisible soundproofing buffered the air, translating the complete soundlessness to my ears, leaving them straining for more; an insatiable hunger for silence.

My hiking companion suddenly made a cheerful comment about the uniqueness of the terrain. While using an ordinary level of sound, it filtered to my awareness as jarring and out of place. I found myself putting my index finger to my mouth and emitting what probably sounded like a hiss. I felt like the grade school librarian, but the sense of quiet was so palpable, there seemed no other reasonable response but to protect it. I do not recall any moment before or since where I craved anything more than to simply bask in the replete silence until some inner knowing was satisfied that the saturation was complete.

 

We typically think of desert times as difficult times; but perhaps there is more to it than merely a season to endure. Here are a few things I’ve experienced in several spiritual treks through desert places.

 

Desert times are times of cultivation. One of the first things associated with the desert is lack of water. We come face to face with our need for the most fundamental nutrient of all: water.  The thirst experienced when there is not a ready supply leaves us unable to think of little else than how to satisfy the need.  Thirst is a form of desire, and it is best cultivated when we learn what we most need.

 

Desert times are times of focus. When all is stripped away from what we most need, we become intimately in touch with what is essential, and what is not necessary for survival.  This comes into sharp awareness against the backdrop of lesser distractions.

 

Desert times are times of recalibration.  The newly gained focus of the desert shows us not only what we need to consider, but also what we need to let go of to be free to act. We learn what modes did not serve in the past, and look to new strategies and considerations to arrive at our goals.

 

Desert times are temporary. Like arriving at a crossroads, we linger only long enough to head towards our intended path, and then move in freedom towards the life we are intended to lead. We are led by our thirst to the place where we will drink and be satisfied as we take steps ever closer to the fullness of who we are.

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Desert Awakening | Part 1

Like bending down to pluck a small dusty stone from the ground and study its nuances, I find myself considering one tiny but fundamental aspect of what leads me to the desert: the need to escape the noise.

The clamor of a day can flow into the next on into the next and gradually, almost imperceptibly, into a mute reservoir of despondency. The rest we deeply need seems to elude, and we dream of a haven in which to abide, if even for a few unbroken moments.

[As I began the past paragraph, I mistyped the word “clamor” and wrote “calmor”. Two things immediately stood out to me about this: well, perhaps three.]

There is delightful irony that the letters in the intended word can be rearranged to evoke the antithesis of clamor: calm more. Ah, yes. More of that, please! And even as I write that, it seems a splinter of a prayer, the whole of which is a call for an increase of peace—a place of quiet where at the very least restoration can occur, if not re-creation—a place for glimpsing possibilities and seeing them through to probabilities, and prayerfully, according to divine alignment.

The next awareness was that the word could be parsed with slightly different emphasis to produce the concept: “call more.” Perhaps the anecdote to having more calm is to call more—to call upon the One who exists outside of time ever to intercede for us. How easy it is to feel swept away in the waves that seem to ceaselessly crash over us just as we get the slightest breath to cry for mercy. But these are seasons, not lifetimes to endure.  And even if they are, the remedy is still the same as we own the truth that the mercies of our Creator are new every morning.

The third notion is the freeing reminder that what seems like error, and perhaps is, can often lead to breakthrough. Not just any breakthrough, but the very one we know we need, the one we will breathe into and out of to not only take our next turn around the sun with more than just a few fleeting moments of peace and grace, but the one that will take us to the place we can abide. As we increasingly source from there, we can invite others to do the same.  We can spend much too much time trying to be some semblance of “perfect”—but the truth is that it is usually a rather narcissistic and therefore limited approach to living life forward. As one historian has noted: “Error can often be fertile, but perfection is always sterile.”

The mystery of the dark reservoir is somehow absolved in the silence of uttered heart-prayer. It calls us to stay in the place of remembrance that although the divine hand that keeps us is invisible, it is enough—even when it seems not to be.

In pondering the wisdom born of the hard, dry places of certain seasons in life, the unshakable One who quiets the storm within is with us, waiting for us to call his perfect name.