oh, the waiting.

"We seem to have focused so much on exuberant beginnings and victorious endings that we've forgotten about the slow, sometimes tortuous, unraveling of God's grace that takes place in the 'middle places'." -Sue Monk Kidd

I like to tell myself that I am a trooper when it comes to these "middle places" but in all actuality I am not, not even in the slightest. I like to think that I live well in the in-between, but I often fast-forward to the "hoorah, everything is good" part. I'll encounter a hard time or pain of some sort, feel its sting momentarily, and then vault myself into the future where everything is better and it doesn't hurt anymore. Voila! right? not really. What I often want and pretend to have are quick-fixes, dustings under the rug, an emotional band-aid. That's how our culture functions, right? Quick fixes, one-stop shops, fast everything, gotta keep moving mentality...there is an urgency to life, and I find myself with an urgency to have everything be okay again.

I forget that it's a journey. It's a process. A slow and tortuous unraveling..it's in that uncertain middle place that God is found. Not just at the finish line, "hoorah, everything is good" part. God isn't in the business of quick fixes, but in the journey, in the waiting. We aren't to dust all our pain under the rug and pretend they never dirtied our floors in the first place, but we are to embrace them. I'm not sure I'm ready to gather the many pieces I've dusted under the rug, but I know they're still there. When I'm ready, I'll gather them up, embrace them and begin that slow and tortuous process of transformation.

There is always a time of celebration after the waiting. We celebrate after nine-months when babies are born, at the end of college for graduations, after cold winter months-we bask in the sunshine's rays and after the waiting I, too, will celebrate.

"Waiting is the in-between time. It calls us to be in this moment, this season, without leaning so far into the future that we tear our roots from the present. When we learn to wait, we experience where we are as what is truly substantial and precious in life. We discover as T.S. Eliot wrote, 'a lifetime burning in every moment'. " -Sue Monk Kidd