The wallpaper of my phone is a picture of a quote which says, “It will surely come, it will not delay.” Next to the plastic, rose-bespeckled skull on my desk at school is another quote which says, “The Lord is not slow about his promise.” I think I feel compelled to post these passages of Scripture around my life because I feel like I’m inclined to not believe them and I know that I must.
I find myself doing similar things in other situations, too. There is a massive paper I need to write (yet which I have done essentially nothing on) and I have a desire to write about the role of hope in suffering as a Christian. This is not because I feel particularly hopeful or because I view myself as a very good suffer-er. And yet there is an attraction to this tension between suffering and hope. Or, as another example, recently, I read the description of a fictional story and it repelled and annoyed me, sounding far too similar in some ways to my own life, and so I bought it.
I’m not sure I love the tension that life offers to me and yet there is something intriguing about it. At times I run from it, not wanting to parse the particular stresses and contradictions in life. Other times, I sprint towards it, wanting one strain of my heart to engage in a head-on collision with another. Or for the misconceptions or untruths I believe to smash brilliantly into the truth or clarity which they don’t want to encounter.
Perhaps it is simply reflected in how I feel about Advent. I love the time of anticipation, the preparations, the slow moving from darkness to light, the delayed gratification. However, I also feel the tension in the season and am quick to see how I also greatly dislike that same tension in my own life, when the end of the journey is not quite so clear-cut and the conclusion unknown. The season of Advent continually calls this tension to mind as we prepare both for Christmas (clearly marked out for December 25th) and the end of our lives (very unclear and uncertain for most of us). It is a delight and a sorrow, a thing of great pleasure and one of profound suffering. Yet it is a tension in which we all must live.
The other day in prison, one of the men was telling me about a question being asked of him about why he believed something and then the almost obsessive activity of trying to find a satisfying answer to the question. I was listening to him but also thinking of my own experiences of tension and so I said, “The tension can be a good place to be.” He seemed a little surprised but our conversation soon ended. Later on, I thought about it and considered how intensifying the tension or delighting in the tension for its own sake might not be the best thing.
It seems there must be a balance between recognizing the tension in one’s life without getting swept away by it. Like the Scripture passages I keep frequently before my eyes, the Lord is coming and without delay, even while this doesn’t seem to be the case. There is a tension between my perception of reality and the reality God invites me to embrace. Even if I want to see things how God does, I cannot quite do it, at least on this side of Heaven.
So we are called to live in the already and the not yet.
Despite the feelings of delay, the Lord is not holding back or keeping from me any good which would be in my ultimate benefit to receive right now. He is hastening to arrive, even if it seems painfully slow. The tension is the present experience, but it seeks to make way for a reality which is beyond our ability to comprehend, a beauty which is ineffable, a goodness we cannot fathom.
In these final days of Advent, may the Lord find us watching and waiting, with joy mixed with sorrow, with delight and yet long-suffering, as we anticipate His arrival, which will make all things new.
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Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash
Seeking After His Heart 