A Spirituality of Waiting - Part 2

Continued from A Spirituality of Waiting - Part 1


My mother in law died five years ago. She lived next door to us. Around her house is a small garden. Because of her age, she was not able to tend her garden as much as she would have wanted.

I grew up in a garden. As a little girl, I always knew where to find my father - in his garden. Papa had a cabinet where he kept his garden tools, his garden shoes, his garden pants. My father was a gardener at heart, and just like him, I am a gardener at heart.

I would look at my mom in law's garden wishing I had the freedom to take care of it. A few times after I had done some well-meaning changes, she had reprimanded me. So to respect and honor her, I left her garden alone.

But the day after we buried her, in honor of her memory, I decided to make her garden a beautiful place. My second son, Worshiper, who is also a gardener at heart, and I set about pruning the vines and the bushes. We cut down a few small trees that were overgrown and crowding each other out. We re-planted, re-potted, tilled the soil, cut the grass. The rose bushes were thick and all over the place, so we pruned those too, even the ones with fair petals in full bloom and other branches just beginning to produce buds.

For a few weeks, it looked like the place was windswept. Nothing left but a few palm trees, a number of pruned vines and bushes, and many wilted cuttings sticking out of the ground.

But in my heart I knew what I was doing; I had already visualized how the garden would eventually look like.

Everyday I was drawn to that garden, devoting care and a loving touch to it. Months later, the garden was recovering, many new leaves and buds were out. The garden was showing great signs of promise.

It was all a matter of patiently waiting for the picture in my heart to materialize.


God put Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Eden has a variety of meanings, one being "delight" or "abundance." I once heard our pastor say that Eden literally means "in the moment," or, "eternal."

There is no time in eternity. Eternity will have a timeless quality about it.

Now that the victory has been won, today you and I are re-planted in Eden, that timeless garden of possibilities.

God gives us opportunities to encounter eternity in our daily lives. It's just that sometimes, the moment is upon us, and we don't recognize it. Therefore we don't seize it, we fail to drink it in, and we lose the opportunity for it to speak new things into our hearts.

But once we have had a foretaste of eternity, we won't be able to get if off our minds, even if our understanding of it may simply be a shadow compared to God's all-encompassing light from which He views all of life.

Being in an eternal moment, where all components of God's creation are at peace and in harmony with each other, I see how my human trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit, can be at peace and in harmony, relating to each other in perfect balance.

Shalom, that Hebrew word for "completeness, soundness, perfection and fullness," is what Eden was all about. I believe that shalom is the essence of all creation - everything complementing one another, everything working perfectly together. Just like an art masterpiece where all the components blend together in perfect harmony and balance.

The God of Peace can only impart peace.

In the eternal moment, shalom is the air I breathe.

This world's time was not God's invention, it came as a result of the fall. Therefore, living and operating under it dehumanizes us, makes us less than human. Because the human beings which God created in Eden, "in the moment," were creatures of shalom.

When Adam fell, time began to be measured, ticking off in seconds, minutes, and hours. It became a taskmaster, and we its slaves.

How awesome to realize, as a sliver of light begins to shine into my understanding, that in God's eyes, this world's time is still under His authority. Henry Cloud calls it redemptive time, or the time God uses to give us divine opportunities to respond to him and be healed, restored, and be put back "in the moment."

No wonder, Hans Burki, the Swiss retreat director I spoke of in my earlier posts, gave his life to teaching many on the value of cultivating inner silence. From this quiet center, we are meant to draw strength and sustenance for this life's journey.

As redeemed human beings, we can go through life operating under the eternal moment. Shalom can be our guiding force. Time doesn't have to tick for us, it doesn't have to be our master. We can flow with it, and be carried off gently on its waves, very much in the way Eugene Peterson says we are to "learn the unforced rhythms of grace."

Time can be our friend and ally to help us fulfill the purposes of God for our lives.

We need not be in a constant state of Zerissenheit, a German word which I understand literally means, "torn-to-pieces hood". Living under the power of the world's time will inevitably shatter us to fragments. I must say that dehumanization is the process of being fragmented, and sadly, isn't humankind very much so today?

My spirit recoils at the thought of ceaseless strivings, and a running after every this and that. Jesus Himself said that if we have food and clothing, with that we can be content.

Contentment. Simplicity. These are the outward manifestations of shalom, of living in the eternal moment. Hans Burki taught us the value of learning to say, "It is good enough."

The psalmist has captured and depicted these lines in a beautiful picture of shalom and the eternal moment:

But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
Like a weaned child with its mother,
Like a weaned child is my soul within me.
- Psalm 131

Sue Monk Kidd once wrote that time is not a continuum on which we merely exist, but a deep dot in which we dwell.

Time can be like a bomb ticking off in seconds. But it can also be a peaceful dwelling place to explore and experience more fully as time goes by, discovering just how rich and how meaningful each moment of our life can be.

Living in the eternal moment helps bring healing and wholeness to us as persons, and leads us onward to the embrace of the Father where He lives in an eternal now.

Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)

Help us to live within Your redemptive time, Lord!

If we are willing, God can help us to re-create life right in this garden of possibilities where we are.

Waiting opens up to us a new perspective from which to view this life. A theology of weakness does not always have to be lived within the context of a future weight of glory, where we are "grinning and bearing it" until we reach heaven! Waiting does not have to be, in the words of Henri Nouwen, an awful desert where we are and where we want to go.

Living out a theology of weakness means a constant encounter with Truth -- the truth of who are are in Christ, and what our destiny is all about.

Everything we do and say and experience can have a creative quality about it for we are "creators" made in the image of God. We are agents of redemption, agents of Christ's mercy and compassion. Death and life are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:22).

I have had to repent time and time again for going through life with a demanding spirit, expecting people and events to live up to my expectations. I've had to repent for making myself the standard by which I measured, or "judged" others!

God has to continually remind me what it means to be as broken bread and poured out wine for the persons around me. And there have been glorious foretastes of heaven when I have chosen to let go of self, to yield my Isaac upon the altar of sacrifice, and receive a measure of freedom I've not experienced before.

God is inviting each of us to live with woundedness without harboring an offended, judgmental spirit, to be patient with our unhealed wounds as well as those of others around us.

It is not only the mountaintop and peak experiences that give beauty and meaning to our daily lives. Christlike character is formed in the valleys of our lives, in our weak moments when we experience deep wounding and yet choose to respond in love and mercy.

And God has so designed it that it is in the valley of our lives where we also become the most fruitful. It is in our wilderness seasons that God sings His sweetest love songs to us. It is in the area of our afflictions, after we have overcome and passed the test, that our anointing flows and spiritual authority begins. It is when our deepest wounds get healed that God's glory shines the brightest!

God doesn't always want to remove us from our pain, just as Paul endured his thorn in the flesh that he may be constantly reminded to be humble.

God is not after our healing, per se. He is after our heart. He wants to see in our hearts a reflection of His glory, truly a lovely bride in the making, spotless and without blemish for the day of His Son's return.

I want to end this Resurrection Sunday post with this quote from Ugo Bassi, one of my favorites, and the one that I want engraved on my tombstone:

Measure thy life by loss and not by gain
Not by the wine drunk but by the wine poured forth
For love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice
And he that suffereth most, hath most to give.


And for those who find themselves struggling to live out a theology of weakness, and feel like your successes are meaningless... maybe you have lived with unhealed wounds... with disappointments, broken dreams.... Or maybe you are just plain weary and worn out from facing life's battles day after day...

God is calling out to all of us with this invitation from Isaiah 40:28-31

Do you not know, have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God
The creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary
And His understanding no one can fathom,
Even youths grow tired and weary
And young men stumble and fall
But those who hope in the LORD
Will renew their strength
They will soar on wings like eagles
They will run and not grow weary
They will walk and not be faint.