I Am Waiting For Something To Come Back

You did not decide to wait. Nobody decides that. It happened the way a habit happens, which is to say invisibly and then all at once.

Somewhere around the first year you began to think of the marriage as a thing that was between two states. There was how it used to be, and there was how it would be when the old feeling came back, and there was this, which was neither, and which did not count.

Three years of that. Three years of a life being treated as a corridor.

And I want to name what the waiting has cost, because I think you have not added it up. You have not made plans. You have not started things. You have not let yourself enjoy an ordinary evening, because enjoying it while the marriage is in this condition felt like agreeing to it.

That is a great deal to have handed over.

Two things I will not do. I will not promise you the old feeling returns, because that is not mine to promise and you would not believe me. And I will not tell you it does not matter, because it does.

What I will do is get you out of the corridor.

Waiting that is not a corridor

There is a famous line in Isaiah about waiting, and the reason I want it here is that the waiting it describes is nothing like the waiting of the last three years.

they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength (Isaiah 40:31, King James Version)

The waiting in that sentence has a direction. It is waiting upon somebody. It is attentive and it is toward a person, which is a completely different activity from watching a door for a feeling to walk back through.

And notice what the waiting produces. Strength, renewed, during the waiting. Not at the end of it. The verse does not say they that wait shall eventually receive what they waited for. It says the strength arrives inside the waiting.

You are able to be strengthened in the middle of this rather than after it, and Isaiah 40 has never once put the renewal at the far end of the wait. Isaiah 40:31 has the strength renewed in the waiting itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from a corridor into a room.

That is the whole difference. One kind of waiting is a suspension of your life. The other is a place your life is actually lived.

You have three years that were not empty, and the word has never once described waiting on God as time that does not count. The passage puts renewal inside the waiting rather than at the end of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands back three years somebody has been writing off.

What you put on hold, and taking it back

Let me be practical, because this is where the article earns its keep.

Make an honest list, in your head or on paper, of what has gone undone for three years because of this.

The people you stopped inviting. The thing you meant to learn. The trip you did not book. The friendship you let go quiet because the question about how things are felt unanswerable.

You are looking at three years that belong to you rather than to the waiting, and Isaiah has never once described waiting on God as a life put on hold. Isaiah 40:31 renews the strength inside the waiting itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a diary back to somebody who put it down.

None of those were the marriage. Every one of them was you, holding your own life hostage against a feeling.

And here is the thing that turns it. Taking those back is not disloyalty and it is not giving up. It is not you deciding the marriage does not matter. It is you refusing to make your whole life conditional on a temperature.

You are permitted to live while this is unresolved, and nothing in scripture has ever once required a person to suspend themselves. Isaiah 40:31 renews strength in the waiting rather than rewarding the wait at its end, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person back the ordinary week they put down.

You were never asked to hold your breath for three years, and the promise you made has never once been a promise to stop living. It is written that those who wait on the LORD renew their strength, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a diary being filled in again.

Say it, then do a small plain thing

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately small, because small is what actually happens.

Say out loud, alone: the promise is not the feeling. What I promised was presence, and I am present.

Then do one ordinary thing for them. Ordinary is the whole instruction. Bring the trash cans in. Fill the car. Take the coat to be mended.

Nothing romantic. Nothing significant. Nothing that would make either of you talk about it.

You are acting inside a thing you cannot yet feel, and it has never once been the feeling that made an action count. Isaiah 40:31 puts the renewal inside the waiting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody doing a plain errand in the third year.

And then, this week, do one thing off the list you put down. One. Invite somebody. Book the thing.