‘Wait on YHVH, be strong, and let Him strengthen your heart! Wait, I say, on YHVH.’ Psalm 27:14
Dear Ones,
I’m so proud of the amazing, dedicated men and women of God I am surrounded by. Abba tells us to jump and we’ll ask how high. He asks us to prepare and we’re ready to take action. We’re warriors asking for our battle instructions.
And then I hear the word ‘wait’. I hear Abba asking me to sit with Him patiently in stillness and I’ll confess that I’m struggling with it. I’m far more comfortable in action mode where I can focus on doing. Now. Right now. I don’t want to wait. I especially don’t want to wait with intentionality and expectation. If I really have to wait I would rather do distracted waiting. Scan facebook, play youtube videos, read a book, etc. But that’s not what He’s asking. He’s asking us to willingly enter a place of stillness and intentional waiting. A place where we silence the outside world, set aside our productivity, and trust His guidance. The waiting place.
Abba, what is it that You want to show us in the waiting place? What is significant here? Why do we need to practice being still?
Here’s what He is putting on my heart: the waiting place is the only place true submission can happen. This is where we learn to offer our true selves to Him, fully. It is a place where we face and acknowledge the truth of what is happening in our hearts, minds and souls. It is the place where fear and hope meet. A place devoid of control. A place with no guarantees. In the waiting place we submit our own need to be God and we let go. It is a place where we are called to stop striving. The waiting place is a pool party of emotions, dreams, possibilities, pain, and fears. The waiting place is where we are our most vulnerable, our most hopeful. Abba wants us to sit in this place; recognizing, feeling and allowing Him to join us in the chaos of emotion. Only after He enters into the midst of it and speaks to us there, can we truly find the peace to breath out, take His hand, rest and be genuinely still.
The waiting place reveals many things if we will only stop to pay attention. What is it we really are trying not to think about? What are we waiting for? What are we fearing? It’s most likely many things. When I was waiting on adoption I feared not getting a call, and I feared getting a call. I hoped for a child, and I hoped for peace and rest. Our emotions are complicated. Don’t do yourself the disservice of pretending they’re not. God is big enough to handle what we may think is ridiculous, emotional madness. In the waiting place is where we get to voice each one of our secret thoughts and He gets to say; ‘My child, I hear you, I see, I care. Can you trust Me with that?’ Sometimes the answer might even be ‘No.’ God, I don’t know if I can trust You with that, because I can’t trust You to give it to me.’ That answer isn’t heretical; it’s honest, and a beginning of a true relationship with God. He can handle it, and He can help you dig deeper into why you struggle to trust Him. I follow that answer up with, ‘Abba, You know I want to trust You. It just hurts. Help me offer that dream to You as a sacrifice.’
Let me be extremely honest here. We all like to believe that we trust God with everything. But do we? We cannot trust God to never disappoint us. His ways are not our ways.
We cannot trust God to keep pain out of our lives. Again, His ways are not our ways. So what can we trust God with? We can trust Him to be present. We can trust Him to love. We can trust that His ways are good, whether or not they feel good. I believe the hopes and dreams that we struggle to trust Him with are, in fact, the most precious sacrifices we have to offer Him. True sacrifice is not offered without some level of pain. In the stillness of the waiting place I offered Him my image of being a mother. My womb to open or close. It was a painful offering. It was also an offering that brought immense freedom.
In the waiting place is where He asks us to face pain itself. Pain is an important part of the preparation process. I’ll be honest, it’s a part I would really like to ignore. But Abba is asking us to go there, and so we must. I’d like to think of pain as connected to the Fall, something wrong and to be avoided. But what if pain is actually a gift? The fact that it is so often associated with things that are dark and evil makes me want to put it in the same category, but what if it is from God?
Abba guides my mind back to lessons I’ve learned in massage therapy. Since becoming a massage therapist my view of physical pain has shifted. It has taught me that pain truly is a gift. It’s a way our bodies speak to us. How they say, “Slow down, stop, something’s wrong and needs attention!” A lot of clients come to me because of pain, but sometimes it’s only in the restful, still place of the massage that they even recognize how much pain their bodies really are in. The waiting place is where we have the opportunity to stop and recognize our places of pain.
We’re people that want to either avoid pain all together or push through and prove that nothing is “too much” for us. We try to push past what our bodies and our spirits are allowing. We need to learn to rest and breathe into the pain. Muscles that are fighting against the pain, holding themselves tightly in self-protection, are the ones that will feel the most pain and are more likely to be injured. Amazingly, I’ve learned that when my client is emotionally able to submit to pain (by that I mean, not tensing in self-protection, but trusting me and even resting into it), I am able to work deeper with less pain and less potential for damage. The waiting place is what allows us to find our emotional self-protection and offer it to Abba. This is where we acknowledge it and learn to relax into the pain, trusting Him to work out knots.
Here’s an example: We don’t get such horrible whiplash from car accidents because of the impact itself. We get it because we have tensed our muscles out of self-protection. My great grandmother fell out of a car onto a highway and walked away with nothing but scratches. Why? She was completely asleep when it happened. She didn’t have the time or mentality to brace herself for the fall, and that inability to protect herself actually protected her. Talk about counterintuitive!
I believe these same principles translate into emotional pain. I believe we have inflicted more damage on ourselves through our attempts at self-protection. Our attempts to suck it up, put a strong face on it, keep moving, control more, etc. I have gone through several different seasons and types of pain: loss of friends, homes, countries I loved, pets, family, the pain of a broken heart, and the pain of infertility. Every year I become more intimately acquainted with this thing called pain. But something has shifted this year. I sense God asking me to stop fighting it, to stop self-protecting. God is asking me to wait, be still, and embrace my weakness, to embrace pain itself. I AM weak! And in this place of pain and weakness, as I am learning to relax my spiritual muscles, breath and submit to it, God is meeting me. The amazing lesson I’m learning is that waiting, stillness and pain are places of intimacy!
Most of us want to avoid waiting and stillness because we want to avoid pain. But pain is a signal, a voice calling us to stop and pay attention when all we want to do is run the other way. What if, instead of avoiding pain, we learned to appreciate it? What if we stopped trying to control or stuff it? What if, when we feel that physical ache in our chests, we saw it as an invitation from God? What if we stopped resenting it? What if we stopped and took time to be still? What if, instead of trying to fix it right away, we waited? What if God, who knows pain and suffering and is intimately acquainted with weeping, wants to connect with our hearts, one longing heart to another? What if learning to appreciate the gifts of waiting, stillness and pain will open our hearts to the appreciation of love itself, and to the appreciation of the One who is love itself, the One who embraced pain and even death, because through it He could embrace us. As we learn to embrace pain and yes, death too, do we learn to embrace Him back? In this place of waiting and stillness we will hold each other, weeping in sorrow and laughing in joy and the crazy, confusing beauty of it all. It’s not the beauty of perfection and ease, but the raw beauty of childbirth: messy and ugly, painful and yet so unbelievably beautiful, waiting between contractions, breathing into the pain, trusting and submitting to the Maker that this is indeed a place of life.
And so we wait, and we are strengthened