Wait

"“Rebecca Brewster Stevenson’s writing is consistently powerful, complex, honest, and hopeful.” –Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making and The Tech-Wise Family

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. - C.S. Lewis

Everyone has endured the endless traffic light, the queue that goes nowhere, the elevator music piped through the phone line. But what of those periods in your life when everything seems on hold? When you can't do the next thing in your professional or personal life because you can't get to it? The persistently unrealized goal feels like an endless road. And hope's constant deferment can be exhausting. A firm answer against the thing you're hoping for—"no"—might be easier than this constant lack of closure. It might be easier to give it up.

Waiting—be it for health, a life partner, a child, a job—can be an agony.

I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.– Simone Weil

What if waiting means to be something else? Waiting doesn't have to mean idleness. Our prolonged state of need might teach us to look beyond the desired goal to something infinitely better. We find lessons on this throughout the Bible and, if we are paying attention, in our own lives.

See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands....–Isaiah 49:16a

Rather than fostering frustration, periods of waiting might have great truths to tell us. It might show us that hope is worthwhile.

Waiting might even be a gift in and of itself.

Pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. –Psalm 62: 8

“Rebecca Brewster Stevenson’s writing is achingly beautiful, her words simultaneously both spare and eloquent. Yet, with its compelling vision and practical wisdom, this is a book in which substance meets—even surpasses—style. Wait demonstrates that beauty convicts in the most powerful way.”–Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books