Reflective Wednesday

In December the Lord clearly spoke to me with the words, "Wait for Me."

Coming off my break up and really disrupted by the recent events, I just didn't get it? What on earth was that?

I wasn't sure where to go with the turbulent and disheveled heart stuff coming up.  There was so much beauty and sorrow all muddled in there. An interior cry rose up, "Where do I go from here? Lord, what do I do with all this?"

Face it.

Be in it.

Don't try to solve it.

Wait for Me.

Tender. Oh, so tender.

I think my first impulse is always to define it.  Decide for myself what waiting for the Lord means. Did it mean not doing anything about my dating life and wait for him to bring my mate? Did it mean waiting on the guy? Did it mean sit in idle stillness because he had something to teach me? Did it mean he was about to do something on my behalf?

Guess what? I still don't know. I'm in it. It's gestating and unfolding as deep spiritual work always does.

One thing that has arisen as I've meandered in and out of this "waiting, God is doing something and I don't know how to put to words what it is but it's happening" place, is the dross of my try-hard, understand and solve faith.  I see how I clamor to frame things going on in my life and define a future because I'm uncomfortable in the goings on in the present. I see how Jesus keeps beckoning me into the mystery and asking for abiding trust.  I see how I wander in and out of leaning into His strength and then going my own way.

Sue Monk Kidd in When the Heart Waits describe it this way, "My still heart, my silence, the very posture of waiting against a backdrop of darkness was my prayer...Making a cocoon and the transformation that goes in inside it involves weaving an environment of prayer, but not the sort of prayer we usually think of. No, this is something mysteriously different. This prayer isn't about talking and doing and thinking. It's about postures. postures of the spirit. It's turning oneself upside down so that everything is emptied out and God can flow in. It's curling up in the fogged spaces of the listening heart, sinking into solitude, wrapping the soul around some little flame of hope that God has ignited. It's sitting on the windowsill of the heart, still and waiting." (pg 126)

The image the Spirit gave me is of me cozying up on a sofa with a warm blanket wrapped around me, staring into the flames of a well kindled fire, Jesus sitting by, and waiting.

Waiting with Him. Finding rest. Building trust.

How is Jesus meeting you in your waiting?