Since I've been given life again after burnout, life has been... full. I'm thankful for renewed energy to engage meaningfully in relationships and work. With all that's been swirling on, both growth inside my heart, and outside around me, it seems perhaps a bit odd to be feel like I'm in waiting. At work we're waiting for some doors of partnership to open. Personally, I'm waiting for clarity in my creative dreams and relational hopes. And yet again, I'm waiting for the right roommate to come along in the right time.
Working with my team at Prayer Current, we've been talking and praying through the idea of "waiting in prayer." One of the key places this idea comes from is Jesus' last interactions with the disciples after his resurrection. After giving the disciples a clear mission, you'd think they were good to go out and accomplish the mission! Yes Jesus told them to wait, and stay in the city until they received power from on high. They had the mission, but they needed to be equipped with the power to do it.
I'm increasingly struck by just how opposite Jesus' kingdom values are with how our natural human wisdom works. We live in a world that tells you to charge ahead and create your own destiny. But my story as a follower of Jesus includes a character much greater and more powerful than me who takes a central focus in the story of my life. God created me, knitted me together in my mother's womb, and gives me breath each day. He is the author of my life.
So if God is the one writing my story, I want to check in with him, talk with him, listen and wait, to see what the next steps are, to see the direction to come, to get all that I need to move forward. Even more, I need to get to know the Author more, so that I can recognize him and his voice, and trust that he can write a way better story than I ever could!
Waiting is not just sitting around, doing nothing, twiddling my thumbs, expecting everything to fall from the sky into my lap with no effort on my part. I'm talking about the kind of waiting where there is action happening... below the surface, often undetected to the natural eye. This kind of waiting is a time of formation, involving almost always a subtle (or sometimes drastic) growth in my heart, and sometimes a stirring of external circumstances and timing before a door opens to walk through. It takes discernment and a supernatural eye to recognize the action that happens in waiting, internally and externally.
Right now it feels a bit like I'm pregnant. I'm leaning toward, expecting, anticipating something within me that feels like it's growing and forming. Never mind that I'm not sure exactly what I'm giving birth to exactly, though I have some early conceptions. I guess it's still too early to tell if it's a boy or a girl.
Yesterday was Day 2 in the 15 Habits of Great Writers Challenge. The second habit of great writers Jeff Goin introduced was, "Believe." He writes, "We choose to see the invisible inside ourselves and bring it to light." When I wait in prayer, it's a foundational step in believing -- choosing to believe God's power, choosing to receive and believe the "divine invisible" that's been placed inside me, and letting Jesus call out the light.
Where are you needing to wait, believe, marinate?
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