They That Wait

 

On waiting, and the door that opens inward.

I was a teenager, on the bus home from school — back when the buses were privately owned, which will tell you how long ago this was. An ordinary seat. The ordinary end of an ordinary day. And then something arrived in me. I did not reach for it. Words rose up from the inside:

*They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.*

I want to be careful here, because it still unsettles me. I had never learned that passage. I have no memory of reading it, no memory of ever setting it down inside myself to be kept. Yet there it was, whole — as though it had been waiting for me to grow quiet enough to hear it.

Then came the second thing, and it is the part I have never been able to explain. Some months later, our church had the chance to broadcast a service, and the priest asked whether I would read the first lesson. I was taken aback, and I asked him why me. He said, *because it is from Isaiah, and it has your favourite passage in it.* I said — it does? And he recited it to me. The same passage. The very words that had risen up on that bus. To this day I do not understand, from any human vantage, how he knew. I have no memory of telling anyone that passage was my favourite. I have no memory of telling anyone I *had* a favourite. Two witnesses, then, to something I never authored.

That passage has journeyed with me ever since. And over the years, slowly, I have come to see the value in the word at the centre of it. *Wait.*

Not lying down

We do not much like the word. We live in a time of getting up and making things happen — we have the tools, we have the intelligence, so we press on, we push, until something breaks and there is a way through. And I know that when I say *wait*, someone will hear *lie down*. Do nothing. Accept your lot. So let me say plainly what I am not saying, and then what I am.

There is a saying at home: *takin’ time ain’ laziness.* Waiting is not lying in bed. Waiting is active. The one who has lost their work does not wait by pulling the covers over their head; they wait by trusting there is something here for me, and using the time to equip, to explore, to come to know themselves, to discern where their passion actually lies. So often we take up work because someone else decided we would be good at it — and when that work ends, our whole effort goes into climbing back onto the same horse. But the ending might be the very door to discovering where I truly am, and what I am actually drawn to. That is not idleness. It is some of the hardest labour there is.

Even in illness there is waiting. The doctors do their part, and then they turn and tell you: rest. Let the body heal. That too is a form of waiting — and it is not passive.

The healing that does not look like healing

Someone will press me on the hard case: some pray for healing and die anyway; by every visible measure, they were not healed. But take the narrow view and none of this will make sense.

Those who ministered to the one who was ill were often healed in their own lives. The one who was ill sometimes came to understand, through the illness and only through it, something that had never been clear before — and could move on, because there was an inner healing. In my work, which is not medicine, healing is not only a person getting up and walking. It also includes closing this life fulfilled. There is a healing that does not remove the thing at all, but changes entirely what it means to carry it.

I do not offer this to excuse apathy. I offer it as a way of calling each experience — so that out of the experience, an explanation may flow, if one is open enough to receive it. Nothing in the universe is without purpose.

My part is my part

This is easier to see if we remember we are not as separate as we imagine. The ancients understood that they lived on in their children. We might put it differently and say we are each part of a larger whole — and that any experience belonging to any part of the whole is, in some real sense, shared by all of it.

So I do not have to finish the thing in my lifetime. I do not have to, as we say, *force-ripe* it. Think of the great cathedrals of Europe, raised over centuries. Generations worked on them. The ones who dug the foundation never saw the spire — but the understanding was always that when it is finished, all will have shared in the fullness of it. The foundation-diggers belong to the joy of the completion. My part is my part. After me, there will be more.

Revelation, not investigation

There is something in our hunger to *know before* that waiting asks us to examine. We can look into a womb now and know the child before the birth. We no longer wait for the disclosure. But notice: the cultures that practise divination also sought to know before — this hunger is not modern at all. So the real question is not knowing versus not-knowing. It is *revelation* versus *investigation*. Whether I go out and seize the knowledge for myself, or allow myself to be told.

Because faith — and this is what waiting finally rests on — is not belief in a set of doctrines. Faith is total reliance. The only sentence that truly needs the word *faith* is a sentence about God, however you name God — because the only thing one can finally rely upon entirely is the whole. To have faith is to admit I cannot see the whole, and therefore I must let the whole reveal itself, in its own time and its own manner.

The door opens inward

Here is what the years have taught me, and it took me long to learn it: **the waiting does not need the door to open to be complete.**

For a long time I thought the point of waiting was the door. But the doors that opened in my life — even the ones I did not want, the ones I would never have chosen because I did not think that was who I was — opened so intentionally, without my desire and without my even thinking of them, that I understood at last the opening was never mine to manage. What I found on the other side was not ease. Sometimes it was the greatest challenge I had known. But there was a purpose so deeply hidden it took years to show its face.

What completes the waiting, I have come to believe, is not the outcome. It is what the waiting works in you — the understanding you did not have before, the inner healing, the closing fulfilled. The door, it turns out, opens inward. And so the completion is never really out ahead of me in time, waiting to arrive. It is here, being worked, now. In the waiting itself, entered rightly, there is already nothing I lack.

This is the pulse I keep returning to — the going out and the coming in, the doing and the being. Waiting is the coming-in: the inward moment when we are fed, the way the heart fills in the pause before it beats again. It is not idleness. It is the deliberate act of coming to a place of receptivity, so that when the guidance comes, it meets something already made ready in you. And then — only then — you go out.

*They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.*

Wait. Then listen. Listen, and receive. Be open to that reception — for it is what leads, at last, to the doing.

So I leave you with the only question that matters in the waiting. Not *how long?* — but: are you here for it? Have you come, quietly and on purpose, to the place where you can receive?