Waiting And Not Sure For What

The music came in through the open window at about half past eight.

A wedding, two streets over. You could not hear the words, only the shape of it. A bass line, a horn section coming in late on the turnaround, a whole room of people shouting the chorus a beat behind the singer the way people do when they are happy and slightly out of time. Then laughing. Then a car door. Then the bass line again.

She stood at the sink with her hands in the water and listened to somebody else's Saturday.

And the strange thing, the thing she would struggle to explain to anybody, is that she was not jealous. It was not about the wedding. It was that the music arrived like a question and she could not answer it. Because somewhere in the middle of all these years she has lost the name of what she has been waiting for.

There was a name once. She could have told you in a sentence, back at the start, and she prayed it with her eyes shut and a hand flat on the kitchen table. Then the years took the sentence apart. The thing she asked for changed shape, or the season for it went by, or she stopped being sure it was ever the right thing to ask, and now there is only the waiting itself, running on with nothing written on it. An engine still turning over in a car that has forgotten the address.

You know that feeling if you have it, and if you have it, nobody around you can see it. It does not look like grief. It does not look like faith under pressure, because there is no longer a clear request to be faithful about. It looks like a woman doing the washing up while somebody else's music comes through the window.

Let me tell you what I hear in that room, and it is not the wedding.

He is named by what He does for the ones who cannot say it

There is a woman in Genesis who runs out of a house and into a wilderness with no plan and no destination.

She is not praying. She has not asked God for anything. She is a servant, pregnant, badly treated and running, and the text finds her sitting by a spring on a road out of town with absolutely nothing settled. She could not have told you what she wanted either. She wanted out. That is not a request, it is a direction.

And God comes to that spring.

Not to a temple. Not to a man of standing on a mountain with an altar. To a woman by a well in the middle of nowhere who did not call for Him, and after the whole exchange is over she does something nobody has done before in the whole of Scripture. She gives God a name.

You are the God who sees me.Genesis 16:13

Sit in that a moment, because there is more comfort in it than in any promise about outcomes.

Of all the things she could have called Him after that meeting, she did not choose the God who fixes it. She did not choose the God who explains, or the God who was quick. She named Him for the thing that had actually happened to her in the dust by that spring: somebody saw her. Somebody knew where she was, and knew her name, and came out to the road that nobody uses.

That is the name I am putting in your hands tonight, in a kitchen with the water going cold.

Because here is the thing about a waiting that has lost its name. You keep assuming the problem is on your side of it. That God is waiting for you to make your request properly again, to get clear, to be able to fill in the form. As though heaven were an office and your file had been returned for incomplete information.

Hagar filled in no form. God went to the spring.

And I want to name the ache honestly, because it is a real one and it is rarely spoken. It is lonely to want something you cannot describe. It makes you awkward in a prayer meeting. It makes you go quiet when somebody asks what you are believing for, because the honest answer is I could not tell you any more, and that sounds to you like a lack of faith.

It is not. Hear me. A long wait is never a verdict on you. It is not a mark against your name, it is not evidence that you asked wrong, and it is not God working slowly through a queue. Nobody is going to tell you here when this ends, because a date is not ours to hand out and a God who could be put on a timetable would be a very small God to be waiting on.

What can be said is this. He sees. Present tense. Tonight. In the kitchen, with the music coming in the window.