I Cannot Tell Waiting From Wasting Time

There is a question you have been carrying around for about two weeks and it will not resolve.

Is this patience, or is this just nothing happening?

Because from where you sit they are indistinguishable. Both of them look like a pot of soil on a table and a woman going about her days. Nothing in the room tells you which one it is.

And it matters to you enormously, which is worth pausing on, because the pot does not care either way. The seed is doing whatever it is doing at whatever rate it is doing it, and your classification of the two weeks has no effect on any of it.

So the question is not about the plant. It is about what kind of person you have been for two weeks.

If it is patience, then you have been doing something. There is a virtue in it and the time counts for something and you can look back at the two weeks and feel that it was inhabited.

If it is nothing happening, then two weeks went past and you were simply standing there, and that is a different and much worse account of the same days.

You are inside a season whether or not you can name it, and a stretch of time has never once required a label before it was allowed to count.

Let me be plain about why this is hard. It is not a shortage of information. It is that you would like the days already spent to be redeemed in advance, and there is no mechanism for that.

To every thing there is a season

There is a line at the start of Ecclesiastes 3 that everybody knows and almost nobody reads carefully.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version)

To every thing there is a season.

Now look at the claim, because it is bigger than the poem it introduces.

It does not say to every good thing. It does not say to every productive thing, or to every thing you can identify at the time. It says every thing. Which includes the stretch in front of you that you cannot classify.

You are standing in something that already has a season attached to it, and two weeks has never once needed you to identify it before it counted as one. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says every thing without qualification, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a very familiar line answer a question a woman has been carrying for two weeks.

And notice what the verse does not require.

It does not ask anybody to name the season they are in. It does not ask for a report. The seasons in the poem that follows are named from the outside, by the writer, looking back over the whole of it. Nobody standing inside a time to keep silence is told to label it correctly while they are in it.

You have not been asked to classify your own two weeks, and a season has never once depended on the person in it knowing which one it was. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a time that a person cannot name, and the written word appoints the season without consulting anybody about what to call it.

There is one more thing in that verse and it is the word purpose.

A time to every purpose under the heaven. So the seasons are not just categories of weather. They have something they are for. Which means the two weeks you have been auditing was for something whether or not you can see what.

You were inside a purposed stretch of time the whole while you were doubting it, and a period a person cannot account for has never once been a period with nothing in it. The word puts a purpose under every season it names, and the Spirit of God is the one who is doing something in a stretch that looks empty from the kitchen.

The question has no answer and does not need one

Let me deal with the question directly, because I think it should be dismissed rather than answered.

Patience and waiting are not two different substances.

There is no test that separates them. You cannot look at two weeks and find the patience in it the way you would find sugar in a solution. Patience is not a thing that happens alongside the waiting. It is a name we give to waiting afterward, when we have had a look at how it went.

Which means the question is asking you to perform an assessment that can only be made later, and to make it now, about yourself, with nothing to go on.

You are being asked by your own mind for a verdict that cannot be reached from inside the two weeks, and a judgment made too early has never once been more accurate for being made anxiously. The Holy Spirit is the one who releases a person from a question that has no available answer, and Ecclesiastes 3 names its seasons from outside them rather than from within.

And I want to say something about the fear underneath, because that is the real thing.

The fear is that the two weeks were wasted. That is what would hurt. Not the seed. The idea that a stretch of your life went past unused while you stood in the kitchen.

But look at what actually happened in those two weeks. You lived them. You did whatever you did. The days were not suspended pending a result, and they do not become retroactively empty if nothing comes up.

You are not able to lose two weeks retroactively, and two weeks already lived have never once been canceled by what happened at the end of them. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps what is past out of reach of a later verdict, and the written word puts a purpose under every season rather than only under the successful ones.

Put the date under the pot

So here is the assignment, and it is designed to end an argument rather than win it.

Write today's date on a scrap of paper. Put it under the pot. Do not look at it again.

That is the whole thing.

You are able to hand a date over to a piece of paper instead of carrying it, and a number written down has never once needed to be kept in a person's head as well. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says there is a season without asking anybody to track it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in the small act of writing something down and setting it aside.

Here is why this particular exercise.

The counting is what is generating the question. Every time you tally the days, the tally demands an interpretation, and the interpretation is the thing that will not settle. Take the tally out of your head and put it under the pot, and there is nothing left to interpret.

And there is something better in it. If something does come up, the date is there and you can look. If nothing does, you can throw the paper away without ever reading it, and the two weeks closes without a verdict having been passed on it.

You are permitted to close a stretch of time without giving it a name, and a period has never once required a summing up before a person could move on from it. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a thing be finished without being scored, and the word appoints a season and a purpose without ever asking for an account of it.