Someone Waits for Us
“The LORD waits for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion. For the LORD is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for him to help them” Isaiah 30:18.
Breathe. Pause. Look Around. What do you see? Is it turmoil? Perhaps beauty? Sometimes it’s something in between like neutrality. You know ... the “meh” days.
Right now I’m looking at trees whose beauty has been stripped of them due to a brutal winter. The leaves that once dressed the branches have long since fallen and zero signs of impending wonder fill the skies. As I’m struck by what my eyes can only see, something within me started to ponder how rooted trees know what it’s like to wait for the Spring to remake what’s been lost. Each year the trees know they will be shown the “love and compassion” of the sun.
Spiritual Disciplines, whenever we practice them, are like trees waiting on the sun to open up its shiny, healing properties. Our bodies feel the dismay of the tree, though, when the things that used to give it energy and prowess are now weakened by the winters of grief and evil. Some of the side effects of particular spiritual practices like fasting can lead to dryness of mouth or headaches galore. Practices such as silence might sink us into the sand of hopelessness. So, what good could come out of exercises that only reminds us of our lack?
The only answer I could surmise was to treat spiritual disciplines like trees treat the winter, with belief that the Sun waits to shine upon them again, with belief that there is a faithful God ready to do the impossible for us: to show us that we really are loved and waited for in our most desperate situations; that there is a transcendent friend unafraid of what the bleak seasons aggress us with.
Spiritual disciplines anticipate the surprising qualities of God to burst through the mundaneness and terrors of our daily experiences. I’m reminded of Anna in the temple for 84 years, like a tree firmly rooted, encountering the Son and shined upon by the healing properties of baby Jesus’ face. As we near Easter’s triumph over the winter of Satan’s reign, may we know, as Jürgen Moltmann says, “I know: there is someone waiting for me, who will not give me up, who goes ahead of me, who lifts me up, someone to whom I am important.”
