In the waiting we learn to turn to the God of all Comfort, the God who is our food, the God who is broken for us. We learn to long for the age to come. Waiting reorientates our disposition away from this fleeting moment to the eternities to come.

I’m experienced at waiting. I know how to wait with God for things that feel like they’ve been promised and haven’t come. Well, I say I know how to, and what I really mean is that I know what it feels like to live in the between, hanging suspended between hope and hurt.

If I knew how then I’d be a much godlier man.

I wrote an early version of this that told a story about my life and my waiting, it was a cathartic experience to write but I don’t think it would be right to share with you. There’s a truth that I’m learning about who does and does not deserve my story. Most Christians, in my experience at least, are not open enough about their hurts and pains. Sometimes as a pushback people suggest a really radical ‘vulnerability’ that’s just plain unwise: you shouldn’t have anything in your life that you’ve told no-one, but nor should you tell everyone everything.

I’ve told people things I shouldn’t have, and they took the shards of them and stuck them in my back. That’s friendship, of course, the hopeful fear that you trust another with enough of your own mess that they could hurt you. Beautifully, when friendship blossoms, they instead trust you with some of their pain too.

I suspect that everyone reading has a wait of some sort, caught between what we hope for and what seems to be. Even if we narrow it down to just godly desires, I’d take the bet that every Christian who isn’t all shiny and new knows something of the pain of that eschatological tension. Others will be marked more deeply by it.

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