Waiting Rooms

Waiting rooms are hard. I’m sitting in a few of them right now.

In one of them I am sitting beside the bed of my mother as she lies dying. We know that on the other side of this room her real life begins. This life has been tough, but the next one is one of eternally increasing beauty. She will live out who she truly was meant to be and all the fullness of it. However, right now we are stuck in this waiting room of suffering. It’s hard, but the waiting has purchased tiny moments of good. It is still well with our souls.

Another room is the waiting room of the prophetic. Things have been said, things that I believe, but we are stuck in this waiting room. Is it one of suffering? Perhaps. The first moments were filled with fear and traces of doubt. But then something happened, as the waiting got longer the fear and doubts were overcome by the inevitability of the goodness of the Lord. My husband has been teaching me chess. That may seem like a non-sequitur, but it has taught me that of all the pieces on the board the pawns are the most expendable. My compassion for those who are expendable to evil has grown greatly in this waiting room. They truly are pawns in the hands of an angry wanna-be god. Without this waiting room I would have reached none of these conclusions.

This room has also taught me much about what Dutch Sheets called “the synergy of the ages” (it’s in his book An Appeal to Heaven) and how the prophetic works. There is a much, much bigger picture here than our small moment in time.This synergy of the ages fascinates me, I now understand that the prophetic has so much more room to work than we have thought. We think a prophet receives a word and it should be fulfilled by the time the last syllable leaves their mouth. There is a vastness here that demands its due. Those words spoken were thrust into our ether because they needed to start weaving their part of the fabric of the ages, not just to make us feel better or find hope, though they do that. The words spoken by Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah and all the prophets that we have in our modern times who truly spoke as an oracle of God, their words do not fall to the ground. Instead they are woven into the fabric of time and they still matter for us today. I have learned these things from this waiting room.

The final waiting room, though certainly not the last one I will ever be in, comes from waiting for the Savior. My sister asked me the other day what makes me think that we are approaching the end of the age when people have been believing their time is the "End of the Age" since the moment Jesus was enfolded back into the arms of eternity. It was so hard to explain what my spirit knows. That I can feel the ages coming together and the threads pulling together to create the final link in the blanket of time. A friend of mine had a dream of the moment she would have met Jesus in the sky and her heart joyously cried out “Papa, Papa!”, in that instant she woke up. That’s what this whole room feels like. Like two drops of water pulling towards each other on a molecular level until they joyfully meld into one. My whole being pulls towards Him. It is so much more than a simple rescue from a life that gets hard. It is the longing to be truly one. The deep in me cries to the deep in Him. How much longing can a heart hold?

This is what this waiting room has taught me - how to walk in the tension. In the Spirit I am seated at the right hand of the Father in Christ Jesus, but my body and soul longs. There is great grace needed to walk in this tension. Fortunately, the Father is the giver of grace. So, pulled between these realities like an almost over stretched rubber band is where this waiting room is located. It will not be long, sings my soul!

These are my waiting rooms. Waiting rooms are hard places to be. However, they are places where great wisdom and knowledge come to meld into my being. I may fight against the waiting like an impatient youth, but I’m learning the wisdom of the grey-haired patient ones. Perhaps these rooms will give me the patina of the wise-ones and I will be able to wait with you in your rooms.