Waiting and Resignation…..
God will wait until we are ready to hear. He waited in silence for 400 years to speak again, in Jesus, until the proper time. He will wait until we get quiet. This to me is the why he probably “mutilates our ego” (like my friend Melanie says), or brings our particular sorrows. He waits until we come to a place where we have finally exhausted our own words, drop our hands to our sides, and listen. I wonder if the Psalms don’t encourage us to go ahead and yell and scream, because their writers know that we must, if we are to come to the end of it and finally be quiet. And the prolonged nature of our particular sorrows (they last way beyond what we think they should- they end when God is finished), is mainly to bring us to a place of resignation. In my exile, the Gloria became the prayer that voiced this resignation for me: “Glory be to the Father…” It was my “not my will, but Thine” prayer. The other gift prayer was “You have brought me in safety to this new day”. He was giving me, in this terrible season, a surprise that I had somehow made it through another night, and an ability to take whatever provision or deprivation would come with each day- to live with daily bread, with less and less of the controlling, worried thoughts about what tomorrow would bring.
He was also giving me the sense that my story was still being written. It was not over, and the outcome was still to be revealed. I was not “finished”, as my own community seemed to think. The outcomes were not inevitable. There were sorrows, but also mercies yet to come. But I must wait for them.