Good Unto Them That Wait

She has a phrase for the last three years and she uses it without thinking.

While I was waiting.

She says it the way people say while I was between jobs, as a bracket around a period that does not count. Three years ago she asked God about something large, and there has been no movement of any kind, and everything since has been filed as the interval before the thing happens.

She is not idle. She has done a great deal in those three years: work, people, a course she finished, a friendship that has become one of the best in her life.

And she cannot describe any of it without the bracket. It all sits inside while I was waiting, which quietly means: not the real part.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud, and she is nearly forty, which is part of why it frightens her.

She has begun to suspect she is going to arrive at the end of her life having bracketed most of it.

Because this is not the first waiting. There was one in her twenties and another at thirty three, and each of them was three or four years long, and each of them got the same treatment, and if she added them up they would come to something close to a decade of her own life that she has never once counted.

The verse is addressed to the ones still waiting

There is a line in the middle of Lamentations, which is a book about the worst thing that ever happened to that people, and it is oddly specific about who it is for.

The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.Lamentations 3:25

Good unto them that wait.

Not good to them once the waiting is over. Not good afterwards, in retrospect, when the whole thing can be seen properly. The grammar puts the goodness and the waiting in the same moment and describes the people currently in it.

And look where that sentence sits. It is in a book of poems about a burned city, written by somebody in the middle of a catastrophe that had not resolved and was not going to for a long time. He is not writing from the far side. He is writing from inside it.

You are inside the goodness right now, in the waiting rather than after it, and the verse addresses the people still in the middle. That is what the word actually says, not a consolation I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that real in a woman who has bracketed three years.

The bracket is doing the damage

Now let me name the actual problem, because it is not the silence and it is not the three years.

It is the bracket.

The silence is hard, and I am not going to explain it or tell you what God has been doing in it, because I do not know and nobody who tells you does. But a silence you're living through is one thing. A silence that has been allowed to reclassify everything around it is a different and larger thing.

Those three years contain a completed course and one of the best friendships of your life. Those are not in the interval. They are in your life, and they have been quietly demoted by a bracket you never meant to put round them.

And nothing about this season is a gap in His accounting. Scripture calls Him good to the ones who are waiting, present tense, and the Holy Spirit is not treating three years of a woman's life as an interval.

Ask again, and date it

Here is the practical piece, and it has two halves.

Ask the old thing again, out loud, in the present tense. It is still a live question and three years has not made it stale.

And then say today's date out loud with it.

That second half sounds odd and it is the important one. A bracketed period has no dates in it, because nothing in a bracket is a real day. Saying the date puts today back inside your actual life rather than inside the waiting room.

You are living your real life now, and the waiting has never once been an anteroom to it. He promised goodness to those who wait, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a woman count the years she has been discounting.