I Have Waited For Bigger Things Than This

It is a pot of soil on a table and it has been eleven days.

That is all it is. And you are seventy years old, and you have waited for a great deal more than this, and something about these eleven days has gone straight through you in a way that is entirely out of proportion.

You have noticed that. That is why you are still reading.

Because a woman your age has a settled relationship with waiting. You waited on a diagnosis once. You waited on somebody to come home. You waited years on a thing that mattered far more than a pot, and you did it without falling apart, and you would have said, if anybody had asked, that waiting was something you had made your peace with.

And then this. A small pot. Nothing in it. And a tightness in the chest that has no business being there.

You are allowed to be undone by a small thing, and a large old wait has never once made a small new one ridiculous.

Let me say what I think is going on, and you may already know it.

The small wait did not create the tightness. It found it.

It is standing in the same place an older wait stood, and doing the same shape, and the body remembers a shape long after the mind has filed the story. So the pot on the table has quietly become a doorway, and something you thought was finished is standing in it.

My soul doth wait

There is a line in Psalm 130 about waiting that is far more physical than people expect.

I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. (Psalm 130:5 and 6, King James Version)

My soul doth wait.

Notice that he says it twice in one verse and then says the second half twice as well. More than they that watch for the morning. I say, more than they that watch for the morning.

That is not elegant writing. That is a man repeating himself because the feeling has outrun the sentence.

You are looking at a psalm that repeats itself out of pressure, and Scripture has never once tidied up a waiting to make it presentable. Psalm 130:6 says the same line twice in a row, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a piece of Scripture honest enough to sound like a person actually feeling something.

And look at what does the waiting. My soul.

Not my patience. Not my mind. The whole of him, the deepest part, the part that is not under his control. Which means the waiting he is describing is not a discipline he is performing. It is a condition he is in.

You are in a condition rather than failing at a discipline, and a soul that waits has never once been a person doing waiting badly. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in what a person cannot manage rather than only in what they can, and the written word puts the waiting in the soul and not in the will.

And there is one more thing, and it is the reason this psalm belongs on a kitchen table.

Nowhere does he say what he is waiting for.

The psalm names no object. It is a hundred and thirty of the psalms and this one keeps the thing itself entirely unspecified, and so it fits a woman waiting on a diagnosis and a woman waiting on a pot without ranking either of them.

You are not required to have a large enough reason, and a psalm about waiting has never once asked anybody what they were waiting for. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a wait at whatever size it arrives, and the word leaves the object of that waiting unnamed on purpose.

The pot is a doorway

Let me be practical about the mechanism, because seeing it plainly takes some of the weight off.

Your body does not sort waits by importance.

The tightness in the chest, the going back to look, the way your attention keeps returning to it, all of that is the same machinery running whether the thing at the end is a test result or a bean. The machinery does not know the difference. It only knows the shape.

So an eleven day wait over something trivial can switch on the whole apparatus that was built by something that was not trivial at all.

You were never being ridiculous, and a small thing that switches on a large machinery has never once been evidence that a person has lost their proportion. The Holy Spirit is the one who understands the machinery He made, and Psalm 130 describes a soul in that exact condition without one word of correction.

And here is the part that I think will be a relief.

This does not mean the old thing was unresolved. That is the fear, is it not. That the peace was never really made, and that all these years were managing rather than healed.

Not necessarily. A body can carry the memory of a shape long after the wound in it has closed. A knee that was broken twenty years ago still knows about rain, and the knee is not broken.

You are not necessarily carrying an open wound, and a body remembering a shape has never once proved that the thing that made it is still bleeding. The Spirit of God is the one who knows the difference between a memory and an injury, and the written word puts the waiting in the soul without ever calling it a failure.

Say the older thing out loud

So here is the assignment, and it is not about the pot at all.

Say out loud, once, the name of the older thing that is still unfinished.

Not the pot. The other one. You know exactly which one it is, and you knew before I finished the sentence.

You are able to name a thing that has been standing in the room without being named, and one sentence said out loud has never once been too small to open a door that was already ajar. Psalm 130 says my soul doth wait and then says it again, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman putting a name on something at a kitchen table.

Say it alone if you would rather. This does not need a witness and it is not a confession.

And do not attach anything to it. Do not explain it, do not qualify it, do not add the sentence about how it was a long time ago and other people have had worse. Just the name of the thing, said once, in the room where the pot is.

You are permitted to name it without commentary, and a plain sentence has never once required the apology a person is used to putting after it. The Holy Spirit is the one who receives a thing said without any qualification attached, and the word leaves the object of waiting unnamed and asks for no account of it.

Then let it be. Do not work on it. The point is not to resolve anything today. The point is that a thing standing in a doorway is easier to be near once somebody has said its name.