Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.
- King David, Psalm 27:14 -
“How much of human life is spent in waiting...”
There are two kinds of waiting.
One person waits towards an end, towards the curtain close, the way you choke down an aspirin and wait for the pain to subside. You know the kind of person. You see them as you walk the desert. Theirs are the camps, the townships, built upon along the roadside; the Bedouin communes who set up, sit down and settle in. They long since decided that the meaning of life is to endure it, so they build sandcastles and live in them, with their dearest desire only that they will go to the grave without any broken bones.
One person waits towards an end, whilst another waits towards a new beginning.
That was Caleb, all over. Forty years he had spent walking the desert. He had watched his friends and family die out around him, a living fossil of an extinct age; all of it in waiting for the next place. As a younger man Caleb had been amongst the first to enter the Promised Land on the original scouting mission. He had foretasted what was to come, and nothing less would ever satisfy again. But he was alone, only Joshua would share his reckless readiness to take the land. The rest had set up shop in the desert. He found himself a conqueror amongst cowards, a pilgrim in a camp of Bedouins.
So he waited. For forty years he waited, until the entire generation was past, all for this day, the day his footstep marks a land he has walked once before, done with the tortuous and unyielding desert, free and, at last, home. And in this moment he turns to Joshua, the only other man who had laid eyes on the promise, and claims that for which he has longed. “Just as the Lord promised, he has kept me alive for forty five years while Israel moved about in this desert. So here I am today, eighty five years old! And I am still as strong as I was the day Moses sent me out. Now give me what the Lord promised me that day, the hill country where the Anakites live. Give it to me, and I will drive them out.” (Joshua 14)
One person waits towards an end, another waits towards a new beginning.
The difference is what their waiting inspires of the time they have.
I resonate with Caleb’s story. It must have seemed unfair that he was afforded a taste of something so good that he would never stomach anything less, and then had to wait half his life to taste it again. So too for me, it feels unfair that I would bathe in sunlight one minute and be lost beneath opaque skies the next. So often I have walked with God into the next place, into more impossible joy, into surer and more steadfast trust, into greater love, wider compassion; into the presence and power of his spirit and the deeper and more dangerous things of his heart. And then the next day, it’s different. The place I stood with my flag stuck in the ground is just the next place again. Like a subsiding tide, I’ve gone one step forward and two steps back. The things I praised him for yesterday are exchanged for a memory of things lost, or a dream of things that never were at all. I look about me for the root of the problem, like searching for a splinter in your foot that you can feel but cannot see. I don’t find what I’m looking for, but I do stumble upon something else. Something beautiful.
That I have tasted the next place and nothing less will ever satisfy again.
I don’t know what it is that makes me track backwards sometimes on my walk with God, or if I’m even tracking backwards at all. Perhaps, not trusting that he won’t snatch it back out of my hands, I hold onto the gift so tight it breaks. I know the fault is not God’s, I hope the fault is not mine, and the only thing of which I’m sure, after all this time walking with Him, is that I will settle for nothing less than a life spent giving him everything. Knowing that there is always more doesn’t make you stagnate in the now. It sets your feet to running. It makes you wait in the direction of a new beginning. It makes you chase after something you saw once, maybe so fleeting you would even doubt it was real, like a shooting star spanning the sky, were it not for the image it emblazoned on your eyes. And in life’s darker hours, in its pits, in its joys and in all the mundane mediocrity that fills in the rest, it is the longing for more that compels you overcome where others only endure. There you find yourself encountering the unyielding desert with an unyielding heart, demanding everything you have that you might lay hold of everything that is to come. You live from the next place, you find your purpose in the next place, and you know that whichever place you find yourself now, it is only a dim reflection of the unveiled wonder of the next place.
That was Caleb’s story. By God’s grace, it’ll be mine. Because the champions of this life are not those who come to its end dressed, pressed and glad that it’s over, but the spent and scarred few who fought their way to its end, a sword in hand and a song in heart, that they might stand as conquerors among cowards. The crown they receive will bear glory the weight of the cross they carried. Their life is spent in waiting, not for an end but for a new beginning.
You will surely forget your trouble
Recalling it only as waters gone by
Life will be brighter than noonday
And darkness will become like morning
You will be secure; because there is hope
You will look about you
And take your rest in safety
- Job 11 -
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