Waiting On The Results

The phone is lying face down on the kitchen table, and it has been face down since Tuesday.

That was his own idea. Face down means he does not see the screen light up, which means he does not get the small violent lift in the chest forty times a day for a delivery notice or his brother sending a picture of a dog.

It has not worked. He checks it more now, because face down means he cannot see whether it lit while he was in the other room.

Eleven days ago he sat in a chair with his sleeve up. Nine to fourteen working days, the woman said, and she said it kindly, and she has no idea that he has since worked out what nine to fourteen working days means four separate ways depending on whether you count the bank holiday.

He is a reasonable man. He knows the arithmetic of it, he knows most of these come back fine, he has said so out loud twice to his wife in a voice he was quite pleased with.

And still.

He has already had the bad news four times this week. Once at the sink on Wednesday, in full detail, including the conversation with his daughter and how his voice would go. Once driving. Twice at about half past four in the morning, which is when it comes with the sound turned all the way up.

He has had the good news too, once, on Thursday, and that was somehow worse, because hoping costs something and he could feel the price of it going out of him.

So he is living in a corridor. Not the room he was in before, not the room he will be in after. Eleven days of walking a corridor that has no windows, doing his job, making the tea, and being somewhere else the entire time.

And the thing he has not said to anyone: he has stopped praying about it. Not out of anger. He simply ran out of ways to ask, and asking started to feel like leaning on a bell that nobody is coming to.

The corridor is not a gap in your life

Here is a line written by a man sitting in the ruins of a city that had actually burned. Not a comfortable man. Not a man who had never had bad news.

The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.Lamentations 3:25 and 26

Notice what he does not say. He does not say the Lord is good when the waiting ends. He does not say the good arrives with the result.

He says the Lord is good to those who wait. Present tense, inside the corridor, in the eleventh day, with the phone face down on the table.

That means these days are not a gap in your life. They are days. They count. They are being lived under the same goodness that will be there on the day the answer comes, and that goodness does not go up or down depending on what the answer turns out to be. Nothing about God is waiting for your result. He is not on hold with you.

And then the second line, which is the practical one. It is good that one should wait quietly.

That word quietly is not asking you to feel calm. It is not a mood you are failing at. It is about the noise, and the noise is the rehearsing.

You have had the bad news four times this week. Every one of those was a full performance: the phone call, the faces, the drive home, what you would say and how you would say it. And here is what it cost you. Your body cannot tell the difference between a thing imagined in detail and a thing happening. You have paid the price of the worst outcome four times, in advance, for an outcome that has not been announced and may never arrive.

That is the noise. Waiting quietly means declining the rehearsal. Not pretending. Not being brave. Just refusing to hold the funeral for something that has not died.

I know a little about the arithmetic of waiting. I once had two years of walking a slope after a fire, putting things in the ground with my own hands and having absolutely no way to know for a very long time what had taken and what had not. The waiting was not a pause in that work. The waiting was the work.

Now let me name the pit, because you have been in it eleven days.

You are exhausted from a thing that is not happening. You have been fully braced since Tuesday and there is nothing to brace against yet. You have stopped enjoying anything, because enjoying feels like taking your eye off it. You have stopped praying, and you have quietly started grading yourself for that too.

Hear me. Running out of ways to ask is not backsliding, and it is not unbelief. The old psalms are full of people who had said everything they had to say and simply sat there in front of God with nothing left in their mouths. He did not walk out on any of them.