I was cleaning out my desk this weekend and I came across a folded up stack of papers that made me laugh. It was my notes from something I shared in church a couple of years ago.
Back in early 2015, I got an email from our worship pastor, David. He told me that each Sunday during the upcoming Lenten season, they wanted a church member to share about something in their life that aligned with that week’s theme. He asked if I would share during the week on Psalm 130 – waiting. I laughed out loud when I read that. I mean, I understood why he thought of me, especially given what had been going on the past few months of my life, but he had no clue what a bad idea that was. In fact, the first question I asked him was whether or not Derek, our pastor, had given the okay for him to ask me to share. Because while David knew what was happening in my life on the surface, Derek had a little more exposure to what a miserable person I really was at the time. It was just a few weeks earlier that I had to apologize for a profanity-laced email I sent him because he asked me a simple question about our Christmas party (yes, I was actually sending emails full of profanity to my pastor but that’s just when I wasn’t swearing at him in person).
But I digress.
I don’t know why I agreed to do it or why Derek trusted me to do it. It was basically my nightmare and I was a huge mess and not to be trusted with a mic. I decided immediately that I could spin my story to make myself look better (this was going to be incredibly difficult given the state of things but I was prideful enough to think I could do it). But turns out the Lord wasn’t going to let me do that. In the process of trying to write myself as the hero of my story, he really started to do a work in me. By the time I stood up in front of my friends (and a surprising amount of total strangers) on March 22, 2015, I felt like a new person. I knew who the hero of the story was and it definitely wasn’t me. I won’t put the whole thing here, but here’s a little bit of what I shared:
I moved to Staten Island about a year and a half ago after the Lord orchestrated a lot of things and spoke to me really clearly that I was supposed to be there. I remember Sara, my roommate at the time, telling me, “You really need to remember this feeling and how confident you are that he is calling you there because there will be days when you start to question it and you won’t FEEL like being there.” And I was like, “nahhhhhhh.” I thought this was the beginning of a beautiful story and I couldn’t WAIT to see what he was going to do.
And then he began to painfully strip away everything and everyone I was putting my hope in and sin and conflict completely unraveled my community in Staten Island. I found myself with essentially no one in a place where I didn’t belong. And it was very lonely. But he told me to wait.
And then things kept getting worse – my roommate moved out and 4 months later, I still don’t have one. A job change I thought was guaranteed fell through, leaving me with basically no role, and a tragic and unexpected death completely rocked my world. I had no job, no roommate, no community, nothing. I didn’t even have enough money to pay my rent. But still he told me to wait.
I felt like I was just a pawn in some sick game. Like he doesn’t care about me or Staten Island and he was delighting in my pain. I believed those things because my life doesn’t look the way I thought it should. I sat in our monthly community group leaders’ meetings and felt so angry that everyone else’s CG was thriving and mine had completely fallen apart. I felt like my own sin and poor leadership had destroyed everything. I’m so ashamed of the ridiculous lies of the enemy that I’ve believed. That he is not good, that his plans are for my harm, that he won’t fulfill the promises he’s clearly given me in scripture.
But waiting is not punishment.
Waiting is not punishment.
God is who he is. He’s immutable, immovable, and completely sovereign. And he’s good. I still have days when I’m so mad at him for this season that I’m in. But I know that it is his grace to strip me of everything I cling to that is not him.
That still rings true. It really was his grace to me to rip away everything I was putting my trust in and make me wait. And he made me wait a while with no answers and no clear direction. It was a long time before some of those things got worked out. Another couple of months before I had a secure job again, 5 months before I got a new roommate, 7 or 8 months before my community saw any sort of consistency. The grief never goes away. But a year and a half later, I can see so clearly that he was increasing my faith and my trust in him as a good Father. He also blessed and humbled me incredibly through the care of my friends and family (including my parents and my sweet grandmother, who actually paid my rent for several months during that time).
And here I am in a season of waiting again. There are some big decisions I’m praying about and he hasn’t given me an answer just yet. But I know he wants me to be patient and to trust him. So I will. Hopefully not as begrudgingly as I did a year and a half ago.
I guess in some ways I will always be waiting. But it’s a beautiful thing to wait on the Lord. Not a punishment.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
Psalm 130:5-6
Let Go, My Soul 