Waiting Is Not Nothing Happening

She keeps a note on her phone and she is embarrassed about the note.

It started as a good idea. She was going to write down what came out of the time, so she would have a record, so she could look back in a year and see. She has friends who do that and it seems to serve them well.

What it has become is a scorecard. Some days there is a line in it. Most days there is nothing, and on the days when there is nothing she closes the phone and something in her chest goes down about an inch and she carries that for the rest of the morning.

She would not use the word failed, out loud, to another person. Inside her own head she uses it about four times a week.

And the thing that has begun to happen, which is why she is here, is that she has started shortening it. Not deciding to. Just finding that she gets up earlier than she used to, on the days when it feels like nothing is going to arrive, and there is a small quiet efficiency in that which she recognizes and does not like.

If you are grading yours, come and sit down on the step for a bit. There is no note being kept in here.

The psalm names waiting as the thing itself

Here is a verse where somebody describes the same hour she has been having, and describes it as the activity rather than as the absence of one.

Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation.Psalm 62:1

My soul waiteth upon God. That is the whole first line, and it is written as a report of something being done and not as a report of something not arriving.

The older sense of the word is worth having. It carries silence in it. Some translations render it as my soul is silent toward God, or waits in stillness, and the picture underneath is of a person who has stopped talking and stopped moving and is simply turned toward somebody.

That is not the waiting room at a garage. That is the waiting of somebody sitting with a person they love, where the sitting is the point and not a delay before the point.

And read what he does not say. He does not report an arrival. He does not say and then He spoke and here is what He said. He tells you what he is doing and where his salvation comes from, and that is the verse, and it went into the songbook exactly like that.

You have been doing the thing itself, and you were doing it on every one of the days you marked down as nothing. Psalm 62:1 is where that sits, in a line that names the waiting as the activity, and the same Spirit who let a silent verse into the collection is the one who takes a scorecard out of a woman's hand.

Why the note became a scorecard, which is not your fault

Let me be fair to the note, because it started as a good instinct and it has been turned into something else by a pressure she did not invent.

We are trained to measure. Every serious thing in her life has a metric attached to it and she is good at all of them, and she brought that competence to God because it is what she has, and nobody warned her.

But look at what the note can and cannot see. It records arrivals. That is all it can do. A sentence that landed, a name that came, an idea about somebody. Those are real and worth writing down and I would not stop her.

What it cannot record is the part the psalm is actually about. It cannot record a woman turned toward God in silence for twenty minutes. There is no field for that, and so a morning full of exactly what Psalm 62 describes gets entered as a blank, and the blank gets read as a verdict, and the verdict is wrong.

You are not being assessed on output, and you were never once being assessed on it. He promised it, in the words about the Father who sees in secret and needs no report of it afterward (Matthew 6:6), and His Spirit does not evaluate a morning by whether it produced a line.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go further, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there never will be one.

And I want to say this to a woman who has started scoring herself: if you are somebody who measures, please be careful with this whole subject, and please do not let anything on this site become another thing to be good at. The time here is any time you can free, and freeing it does not have to involve your body in any way.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic sense. None of it fails anything.

You are fully welcome in this, and you were never at the margin of it because of anything your body needs. That is 2 Corinthians 8:12, not my kindness, and His Spirit has never once been distributed on the basis of what somebody is able for.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.