anticipation

Pausing Between Testaments

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I have a love hate relationship with waiting. I love the anticipation of waiting for something good that I know is coming. I resist waiting with hope in seasons of pain, grief, and isolation.

I just finished the Old Testament, except for a few Psalms and Proverbs, and stared at that stark page announcing the New Testament. An impression came over me that at this moment I needed to slow down for a day and reflect rather than plough on through to the gospels.

While I’m waiting a day to move forward, others before me waited 400 years between their last communication from God and the arrival of Jesus. Even that arrival of Jesus wasn’t well known to the community for decades and many never acknowledged or realized that He was the One that they waited to appear.

What must it be like to wait for God in His silence and anticipate all that seems to be coming while also living occupied and oppressed, holding onto a thread of hope?

I’m not sure but as I paused and reflected on my reading of the Bible thus far, a litany of thoughts and impressions occupied me.

Here’s what I contemplated as I paused between testaments:

humanity is a little like a rotten melon–shouldn’t we be better than we are when you actually look inside?

People are hopelessly messed up and keep doing the same wrong things over and over again. In Egypt, God rescues His people with signs and wonders, news of which spread far and wide striking fear into surrounding nations. But it wasn’t enough to permanently change the people’s hearts to trust God. The kings they wanted couldn’t fix them and actually made things worse. Even those that wanted to do good couldn’t seem to keep themselves from messing up.

2500 + years later I don’t see any evidence that people, on our own, do anything different or better. We still face ourselves in all the same failures and evil related in the Bible thousands of years ago.

God communicated with people…a very lot. The shear massive size of the books of the Old Testament filled with the story of who God is, who people are, what’s wrong with the relationship between God and people, how people feel about God, stories of how myriad people respond to God, and the pervasive humanity of it all…it is quite overwhelming.

Besides Daniel, there’s not really a character in the Bible that comes shining through. They all have very real, very human issues and failures. There’s no hiding reality and many parts are just tough to read. The world has been and is and will be a very difficult place to live because of that first point. And yet, God preserved His communication telling people who He is and inviting them, wooing them, even commanding them to return to Him over and over and over in order to live the full life He offers.

Easter eggs. It gets talked about a lot in reference to Taylor Swift these days. But the Old Testament is just filled with Easter eggs referencing a better future, a resolution of the problems in people and between people and God. They’re thrown in all over the place and, again, a brisk read through makes them even more obvious in my experience.

At some point in the future…things will be so different between people and God and it’s going to be amazing. Abundant harvests, peace, joy, feasts, justice, rest, a place for everyone, many from all nations under God’s favor… and an end to all the horror that exists in the people’s current reality.

More of a real egg than an Easter egg

Glittering passages of expectation and hope scattered through vast fields of sadness, despair, and tragedy…easter eggs.

Hope, expectation, and confusion. That’s what I’m left with as I stare at the title page for the New Testament. That title page represents a 400 year gap between the New and Old.

400 years where, if I were those people in Israel, I’d be thinking…now what?

We came up from Egypt and messed up in the Promised Land, royally messed up God’s plan. We got exiled, justly, and God preserved a remnant like He said He would. We thought we learned our lessons. Keep the Sabbath, follow the law, don’t worship idols, worship God at the one place He says. Then, miracle of all miracles, exactly 70 years later, kings who worshiped all kinds of other gods actually let us come back to Jerusalem, build the temple, build back the wall, settle back in the land.

It was touch and go at first in the whole obedience department. Some went back to the old ways and Nehemiah had to pull some hair but we think we got it this time. We are going to excel at keeping the Sabbath and following the law and not worshiping idols and worship only at the temple this time. When God sees we got that down, we get our King back, the one in the David dynasty, and we’re out from the thumb of all these nations like we were before. We’re back on the world stage, politically powerful and everyone sees that God is Almighty. We win wars again and we have the prosperity like God promised originally. This David-like King is promised to be something really extraordinary!

Being in the waiting period must be like having an outline of the puzzle but not all the pieces fitted yet…kind of exasperating

We just gotta do better and things will get better for us…except 400 years pass and we have no king, no political power, we’re still dominated by other nations, struggling to survive. We’re desperately trying to figure out what detail we’re missing in the law, what is keeping God from delivering us again? When we rebuilt the temple, why did the cloud and the fire not come down like it did at other times? Where is God? Who is this Elijah like person He promises will come in the future? Why is He waiting, when is it going to happen? When will we get that powerful king? When will He at least talk to us again?

And the people wait and anticipate and hope and try to cling to God…or at least His law.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

What if…

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 2 Comments

So much news predicts such a grim future. Life as we know it gone. Futures forever changed. This generation will suffer the worst.

I’m glad I don’t know the future. Anticipating the unknown has usually proved more awful than actually walking through it for me.

But, what if all the adversity predicted is the severe road to a better future, a different life lived from a different source, for us and our kids?

Along those lines, I wrote the following lines…

What if all the losses taught us to mourn?

What if all the mourning taught us to empathize?

What if all the empathy taught us humility?

What if all the humility taught us our poverty of soul?

What if our poverty taught us to search?

What if in our searching we found God? Who knows loss. Who mourns. Who empathizes. Who endured poverty. Who meets our needs?

Our need for Him to restore our dignity. Forgive our wrong. Heal our wound. Feed our mouth. Guide our path… Replace our heart.

With a new heart. A heart warm, not cold. A heart alive, not dead. A heart that feels, not numb. A hear not sick anymore.

What if our hope was not on the stock market, the cure, the vaccine, the vindication, the political party, the back to normal?

But in Christ

Who makes all things new

Even this broken world

Even we broken people

Would we then welcome the losses that taught us to mourn?

The mourning that taught us empathy?

The empathy that taught us our poverty?

The poverty that taught our need?

And the need that taught us to search?

And the search that brought us to the heart of God?

To me, the stairs are the adversity and the joyful girl at the top, my daughter, like the joy of finding God along a hard steep, path in life.

Being Still

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 1 Comment

I expected Easter weekend to be full of far flung friends gathered for a special wedding celebration—a dear friend united in marriage in the witness of many other dear friends.

A big celebration surrounded by many other little celebrations of a community separated and once again united for a weekend.

As shut downs and shelter-in-places spread across the world, the celebrations are delayed, the wedding postponed as we all wait for the unknown.

Our plans all yielded…

We may never be so closely linked in experience or feeling with the followers of Christ this Easter season. The joys of Spring Break in early March feel like Palm Sunday when life seemed like it was going well. An expectation of wonderful Spring!

The snowball of our restrictions parallel the turn of events during Holy Week as Jesus went from a heralded king to a hunted and betrayed man. Life turned upside down for Jesus’ followers.

A much anticipated celebration season flipped to unexpected mourning.

As they witnessed Jesus’ procession with His cross, this man they had followed everywhere for three years, did they think what we think now about our plans…this should not to be? I never saw this coming?

And, when Jesus’ body was placed in the tomb and the Sabbath began, and they sat in their homes did they sit stunned like we do now?

I don’t know what is next? Life as I know it is flipped upside down. What happens when this is over? When we emerge from our homes to a new reality? The ones passed over and not taken by this pandemic.

We wonder about our jobs, whether our kids will go back to school, what our community will suffer. The disciples also worried about their jobs and their lives… what they would suffer when those in power came looking for them the first chance they could leave their home.

Our world, with so many people, has never been so still as on this Passover, this Easter weekend. I have never experienced alongside so many others such uncertainty about what is next.

With all the unexpected quiet and stillness in my home right now, all the itching eagerness to escape and do something, anything else…I identify with Jesus’ followers in a new way this weekend.

Unlike them, I have the hope of knowing the next part of the story for us as followers of Jesus. The joy of the resurrection. The assurance of redemption and the security of a new purpose as His follower that the disciples would soon discover.

But, this weekend, I can identify with them…a party weekend upset and turned into a weekend of wondering quiet waiting for a new, uncertain day.

Writer’s Block

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 3 Comments

Writers block plagues me these days.  It always does when events too big to fathom arise in my life and a big event looms huge on my horizon.  In 2 months we move to America.  We move to America and I’m trying to fit my brain around that reality.

So, my head is swarming with thoughts and emotions and details and, somehow, I can’t put them together enough to form a cohesive deep thought.  Thus is the reason for my weekly posts becoming not weekly.  I just don’t have the words for this yet.  I’m standing in front of this huge thing and I’m so close I can’t figure it out.

But that’s ok.  It’s ok that I can’t figure it out, say it nice, spin it well, or wax poetic.  When the words don’t come forcing them doesn’t work either so I’m learning to be still when all around me is moving.  Be still.  Ponder.  Move slow…while I can.

A day comes soon when boxes will gape at me waiting for me to toss them a bone.  I will thoughtfully sort through all our clothes and shove them into suitcases.

But now is not that time.  Everything in me revs up waiting to shift into gear…but its not that time yet.  It’s the slow down time, the ponder time, the be still time.  I am oh, so bad at it.  The woman in this picture looks like she knows how.  Maybe gazing at her will help me know how to be still!DSC_0449

The boxes and bags are the easy things really.  The people.  That is really what’s got my tongue.  Saying goodbye to the people we’ve lived and worked with for the past 13 years.  The people who knew us when we operated like children because our language ability was so poor in this new land.  They saw us grow up and we saw them grow up.  It is impossibly sad for us all.

But along with it is an excitement about what is to come.  An excitement that rises up and feels traitorous in the presence of all the grief of leaving stands right alongside it.

So, I find myself stumbling around for words and struggling to chain my thoughts together.  Be still.  Slow down.  Ponder.

Just putting pen to paper or, in this case, fingers to keyboard breaks through a bit.  Maybe it is the way God is showing me to slow down, be still, and ponder.  A new thought.

The Art Journey

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 1 Comment

My husband dreams of buying an original piece of art one day so we stray into art galleries on our rare weekends away.  We stroll through discussing what we see.  What we like.  What we don’t.  Picking out that original piece of art gradually changed from a notch on our belt…something to hang on the wall and accomplish, a box to check, into a marriage journey of sorts.

A few years passed before I took my husband seriously.  Buying this original piece is a life dream of his.  I like art and I like original art but I tend to be, how shall I say it?  Cheap.  My husband is frugal and between the two lies a great chasm.  The cost stared me down for years, a barrier to enjoying our art gallery browsing.DSC_0069

At one time, my husband liked the “painter of light” and I most definitely did not.  The ensuing years fleshed out how I felt and forced him to define why he liked what he liked.  Too perfect, too defined, too cliché to me.  Safe, complete, harmonious, calm to him.  I looked at Kincaid in the mall and understood the peace he craves in contrast to the chaos of his upbringing.  I still don’t like Kincaid or art in the mall but I understood why he liked Kincaid.  He began to understand me too.  He began to appreciate the messiness in art that describes so much of life.  The play of colors slashed across a canvas whispered to him and then he understood me just a little more.  Life is messy.

Eventually I embraced our quest for original low-end art.  I accepted my husband’s dream and took it on as my own.  Now I dream the dream as well.  We finally realized with a spark of shock after 14 years of marriage that the pilgrimage to our piece of art is more about our marriage than the art.  Through art we discover each other.  As my love for a style I don’t even know how to name clashes with my husbands mild distaste for same said style, we meet, my husband and I.  We discover each other.  We grow and change and put words to the changes through the media of brush strokes and colors on a canvas.

I feel we never will find our piece of art.  Our search spans like a railroad track that veers closer and closer but never quite meets this side of heaven.  In fact, I almost oppose actually purchasing a piece because I enjoy the journey so much.  Wandering the streets of the world and popping in shops…talking about us through art.

The blank wall remains open filling up with more than the permanence of a painting.

What place does art take in your life?

The Color of Anticipation

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 1 Comment

Orange.  Warm, wonderful, wild orange.  Bought in the dead of winter for toes hiding in thick wool socks and cozy Uggs.  Usually I stick to more conventional…ok…normal colors.  But last week upon exiting the local grocery store, orange caught my eye.

My mind rushed to mid-year break.  Soon, I’d pack my bags with summer clothes.  I’d strategize the least amount of layers I could wear to the airport without freezing for the relatively short distance to donuts, mangoes, and sun.  What would I change into during our layover?  Or, will I change upon reaching our tropical destination?  Anticipation.

Anticipation wields a double-edged blade.  On the one hand it sparks a fire in the everyday as the moment approaches.  Tick off more things on the check list.  Come to a stopping or pausing point in a routine activity.  Contemplate the needs of others in the same situation and speak into the worry, anxiety, and stress of a conference.  Anticipation can move me towards action.

On the flip side, anticipation can start the slow slide toward disengaging too early, of coasting towards the day that I know will come.  I’ll deal with that later, my heart says.  That conflict, that difference of opinion that looms large, that kind word I want to speak.

Important things get put on the back burner as I count on the awaited event radically changing my outlook on life.  Relatively minor activities gain utmost importance like should I or should I not take beach towels?  I’ll have to wash them.  I don’t have a washing machine. But, it’s nice to have more towels.  They’ll get sandy.  On and on my mind goes…anticipating the beach.

Tonight as I paint my toenails orange, I hope the warmth of that color will rouse some praise in my heart about the gift of a break from the cold and fellowship with friends.  Then, as I look at my toes in the tropics I hope orange reminds me to live not just for myself, my break, my fellowship but for whatever He anticipates for me.

What are you anticipating?  What reminds you to live for Christ in the anticipation?