Waiting for God?
As early as my mid-twenties, I began to experience situations in which I felt desperate for God to act. I wanted deliverance, tangible answers to prayer, and I began to hear words from elders speaking of “God’s waiting room.” My theology developed around this idea that sometimes, maybe often, God demands that we wait for answers, that we suffer a bit, while he watches us in all-knowing wisdom. I had this idea that God uses pain, isolation, and confusion to help us grow and mature in holiness. I don’t entirely question the veracity of this but am considering another perspective.
I vividly remember being in the delivery room preparing to give birth to my third child, fiercely wanting to push. In true transition form, I remember yelling, “Hurry up!” as I watched the doctor and nurses move in what seemed to be slow motion. The doctor, not particularly empathetic, drolly replied, “We’ve been waiting for you.” Needless to say, I didn’t appreciate that quip at the time, but I was reminded of it as I read the daily meditation from the Henri Nouwen Society. Nouwen says that “the spirituality of waiting is not simply our waiting for God. It is also participating in God’s own waiting for us and in that way coming to share in the deepest love, which is God’s love.”* How often in my life do I think I am waiting for God to act, to answer my prayers, to deliver, to show me the way. I cry with the Psalmist, “How long, oh, Lord?” I effectively say to God, “Hurry up!” I wonder how many times God has gently whispered, “I am waiting for you.” Waiting for me to be silent, to release the vise-grip on my ego, to stop striving and rest, to simply dwell in love. Unlike my wry obstetrician, God gently guides me through the labor of my life like Jesus revealing truth to his disciples “as they were able to hear it,” having compassion on their stage of spiritual development, admitting that he had “many things to say to [them],” but they couldn’t bear it at the time.+
Divine Love is patient, gazing with an eye that is willing to wait, to wait for me to welcome the Presence and release my demands, my expectations, my perceived injuries. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, leads me tenderly through my protesting, my stumbling, my blindness, my attachment to things of this world, knowing just the right time to reveal truth.
“God’s waiting room,” a place where God arbitrarily puts me to develop patience or endurance, a place of isolation and loneliness, is not the image I see now. In the future, I hope I will be more inclined to query the Divine, “Are you waiting for me?” and wonder how I might open myself up to Love in order to be able to hear whatever it is God wants to reveal.
* Email meditation from March 10, 2021.Text excerpts taken from “You are the Beloved” by Henri J.M. Nouwen, © 2017 by The Henri Nouwen Legacy Trust. Published by Convergent Books.
+Mark 4:33, John 16:12
