Like many people on the planet, I do not love having to wait.
I enjoy movement, forward progress, and activity. Travel, new experiences, and moving my body around the world are things which let me know I am alive. My personality is fine following the Spirit, even when I am not quite sure how I am supposed to land, or where I will land. Whether that means studying Creative Writing in undergrad or earning my master’s on the study of God, I am unafraid, as one Seattle-based librarian put it, to “follow my bliss.”
The challenging thing about following your bliss, or the Spirit, as it were, is that while the path has plenty of freedom, it does not necessarily lead to what we would call a “comfortable” or “predictable” Western life. It is not the “typical”, “normal”, or “expected” path I have walked. Rather, it has been quite the adventurous (some would say unpredictable) one.
One can imagine how COVID-19 affects personalities of a similar slant. Many of us are impatient for the world to get big again. We want to emerge, and explore, and discover. Waiting, to the extent the international pandemic sweeping over the world has required us to, can make us feel antsy or even restless.
Or this waiting, which none of us could have anticipated, can lead us to hope. In a previous blog, I mentioned that hope is violent, that it is tenacious; that it takes pressing into. A friend mentioned this past week that perhaps we have all been inadvertently enrolled in “COVID-19 Homeschool of Spiritual Development.” How closely does that idea resonate?
John Mark Comer, pastor of Bridgetown church in Portland, Oregon, conveyed the following on a Reality SF podcast this past week: “It is not enough for humans to simply live survive. We need to place our hope on something in order to thrive.” Comer continued, “Hope is the absolute expectation of coming good based on the person and promises of God.” Hope, I would argue, needs to be engaged actively in our waiting.
What if we use this time not to become restless as we wait, but to engage in those “courses” presented to us in the Homeschool of Spiritual Development? We’ve already paid the tuition (in our investment of face masks and hand sanitizer and unwillingly fasting our loved ones). Why not take this the whole way?
There are things the Holy Spirit has been putting a finger on in each of our lives, and I’m pretty sure that by week 7 of quarantine, you know what those things are. You can avoid the obvious for one week, maybe two, but by week seven, you are looking in the mirror, and those things are looking right back.
So, on week 7 of this COVID-era blog, I want to invite us to engage in hope. Hope not just in being able to go back to our place of work, or return to the gym, or even a favorite restaurant, but hope in the painful areas.
I am an explorer, and right now, I would love to go somewhere new. But perhaps where I really need to go is somewhere old. The old spaces of achy pain ignored or pushed away. The dreams which appear to be deferred. The yearnings which seem unfulfilled. Perhaps engaging hope with God, in the old and achy spaces, is the “course” many of us are enrolled in right now. Should you find yourself enrolled in that or a similar class, I dare you to be still there. To bring the old things before God. To enter the rest of not having to solve them right away. And to wait. I’ve heard good things come to those who do.