Waiting Is Movement

“Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself…” – Psalm 37:7

My calendar looks really weird these days. It’s a cross between a memorial and an actual planner. There are the actual planned events, mostly zoom’s, but there are also the formerly-planned events that I’ve crossed out but can’t bear to white-out from the space, because I want to remember what we lost: a trip, a graduation, a competition, a meal out. There are far more things crossed out than filled in. There is nothing planned out farther than a month. 

I would like to know how things will play out. What will school for my kids look like in the fall? How much can I expect to be able to work? Will we be sheltering in place again later? Can we travel? Can my parents still come to visit us? But none of us know. The only way the answers can be found is through the passage of time. We are all in a holding pattern. We are all waiting.

And waiting, at least on this colossal of a scale, is not something we as a culture are particularly good at. We like to be doing. We like to be in control. We like to achieve visible results. Waiting for most of us is closely linked with fear. We are afraid of our inner feelings, of other people, of outcomes, of the future: and fearful people have a hard time waiting. Waiting becomes an experience in anxiety. But we must learn to wait, for all of the spiritual life is in a sense about waiting. David says, be still before God and wait without fretfulness—and for most of us, that has to be learned. Learning to wait in an outward sense, as all of us are having to do now, can expose and teach us things that help us to be people who learn to wait in a spiritual sense as well.

I came upon a transcript of a talk that Henri Nouwen gave once called “A Spirituality Of Waiting.” What is the nature of our waiting for God? We wait, he says, as people who have received promises. In each of the three verses before this one is a promise: “he will… he will… he will…” We have received promises that allow us to wait, that are at work in us, as Nouwen writes, “like a seed that has started to grow. This is very important. We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more.”

In other words, the waiting is not wasted. It has a point. It is producing something. We may know these things, but they are empty words without a promise. When Amazon promises my package will come on a certain date, even if it’s now in two weeks instead of two days, I’m willing to wait, at least to the degree that I trust Amazon and want what I ordered. We have promises from God, and what he promises are the desires of our heart, true justice, abundant peace, a great inheritance (verses 4, 6, 11)—do I trust him? Do I long for what he promises? Do I believe that his work has already begun in me? Waiting is never still. It is always a movement, from something to something more.