Waiting, Anticipating, Hoping – In Darkness

“I am weary with my crying;

my throat is parched.

My eyes grow dim

with waiting for my God.”

― Psalm 69:3 (NRSV)

BONES ache with the very thought of a torment irreconcilable – the spiritual becoming physical as the mind makes the body groan. How long will this last? You can sense the psalmist is weary, broken, and about to give up, yet his relationship with God has caused him to shriek into the heavens – “Help me, O God.”

That is quintessential faith in the bucket. One, who had no cause to reckon that faith would win for him, chose faith anyway. At the depths of his cries he is found crying out to God. When he least felt the Presence of God he most sought God.

What a paradox of enigmas of ironies of mysteries is faith!

As we wait, anticipating that we will be granted an ‘affirmative’ to our prayers, and as we grow tired of waiting, but we still hope, because we cannot let go of our hope, God meets us there – and most of all through the valley of hindsight. And this waiting in torment, but which is paradoxically also a waiting in a hope that can’t be given up on, is the testimony of true faith. True light has enabled such an invisible hope.

Holding On When It’s Both Impossible AND You Can’t Let Go

There is such a destination of spirituality that seems to leave us high and dry. We can find ourselves in that despairing destination of attempting to hold on when we can’t, yet in the same way we have no release to give up entirely. We are held by the tension of things – and it is excruciating. But it is a hope.

This hoping in darkness is both hellish and our safety, for a true hope can’t be seen, but it is believed.

Waiting can be a hardship all its own, when day after day after day after day is the same; no outcome on the horizon, we have so many thoughts of giving up and diverting our attentions elsewhere. Yet we don’t give up. We keep stepping.

***

Hoping in God is possible in the most hopeless of situations. When we are tempted to give up on ourselves, but we can’t seem to allow ourselves to do that, we are graced with strength, seemingly from nowhere. Hope is only truly hope when we must stride by faith toward that which can’t be seen.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.