The Waiting

a return to the Eden I think I missed

this is my morning perch. I wish you could hear this photo. Our backyard catches the wind and if you close your eyes, you can hear the mountains calling.

I woke this morning to the thick haze of last night’s neighborhood fireworks display still hanging in the air. When we toured this house back in December, we were informed that on New Year’s Eve and on July 4th, our neighborhood would become ground zero for twelve hours of fireworks and gunfire. We missed the New Year’s Eve display, but y’all, we had a front row seat last night and our neighbors did not disappoint.

Our house was still rattling at 1am with fireworks so big it felt like I was sitting on the back of a pick-up truck, in the middle of a field, while the city of Castalia lit up the sky. But no. These were backyard displays in the middle of Dallas, shot off between trees and swing sets. People were launching screamers and Roman candles, rockets and cherry bombs—off their back patios—in such rapid succession for hours and hours I mentally starting adding up what I imagined to be the price tag for all that working, middle class glory on display. My estimate? Just shy of a million dollars.

I’m glad we live here.

And I am beginning to feel disoriented. The house is quiet. The dinner table feels small. Half of my children are a whole day’s drive away. The whole world looks like they’re on vacation and yet, we just got here, Isaac heads to college in 5 weeks, and I am currently looking for part-time work that fits around our church life.

I am missing the mountains, my children, the rowdy dinner time hour when everyone came home and we became like a kitchen scene from The Bear. I miss my dumb chickens, working at the wine shop, and driving a straight line out into the middle of nowhere, chatting at the sky through the windshield, begging God to be a salve over the ache in my soul. And I miss the familiar ache of longing, of waiting, of deep communion with God in the comfort of the in-between.

Two weeks ago, I told a group of women I was having a hard time touching sadness. I am not sad, I said, but God made me able to plumb the depths of sadness, to touch it, to sit with it until I heard what it had to say and I cannot feel it. I am detached from who I am. I am too busy.

If we had not been wrapping up our book study, I would have welcomed questions from the circle to help me pull that thread. The proclamation that I could not feel sad was a half-baked thought born from an hour of conversation about silence and solitude, but it was wholly true. A whirlwind move, the downsizing of my home, and the subsequent plunge into the beautiful life of our church has left me with little time, space, or energy to feel all the big feelings that naturally come with enormous life change.

I am currently experiencing life like a college student who is counting down the hours until her next class and trying to determine what she can accomplish in those in-between hours. I am waking up flustered, unsure of the day of the week, who I am meeting with or when and where we are meeting. I’m rapidly collecting the stories of people and finding myself unable to keep track of the details, forgetting to reply to text messages and emails, and then suddenly remembering that both of my babies will go back to public school in six weeks and I still need to buy school uniforms.

MomCo launches in September and I am still team building. We’ve got four more weeks of book club before we gear up for another silence and solitude retreat. I’m hoping to lead a women’s bible study and add a family meal to our time together. Thad and I are working together to create and implement a cohort-style model of discipleship that focuses on spiritual formation and soul care in order to encourage emotionally and spiritually healthy leadership within our church. I have so much I want to do with Going Deeper. I want to create experiences where people encounter God in fresh ways. I want to plan a 2027 trip to walk the Camino with 12 other people and I want to begin training now. I want to host people in my home every week and I want to be okay with people just dropping by unannounced.

I also want to sit on the edge of a mountain and stare at the clouds below me. I want to pet my backyard chickens and putter around my yard in my house dress. I want to cook through a cookbook. I want the freedom to book a flight to NC on a whim and surprise my kids with a stocked fridge and a homecooked meal. I want leisure time to travel, to read a book, to spend the weekend at Mount Angel Abbey with a bunch of Benedictine monks. I want to grow tomatoes and a pasture of wildflowers. I want a wraparound porch and a bedroom big enough to hold five sets of bunkbeds for grandbabies.

I want to devour life down to the marrow and then I want to begin again, only slower.

I want it all.

But only if I can feel it all, deep down in my bones right down to the marrow.

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The ability to feel all of life, right down to the marrow, is the gift received in a season of life I fondly refer to as The Waiting. The Waiting is a season where time slows, where thoughts turn inward in search of the quiet voice of God. We are looking for a resolution, for an answer, for deliverance, for resurrection, for God to move and because we are looking for God to show up, we turn our attention towards Him, anticipating that at any given moment He will show up and respond.

We become needy children, dependent upon and desperate for God, in deep communion with Him where every desire hidden within our soul is called forth and held up to the light, beckoning God to see our deepest longings and meet them with the fullness of Himself.

If you are in The Waiting season, lament it but then receive it as a kind mercy of God who desires to meet you in your waiting with the gift of Himself. One day, you will look back on your season of waiting with deep gratitude and a sincere longing to return to Eden where you walked with God in the cool of the evening, wondering how in the world you ever missed the garden within your wilderness of waiting.