The Wait I Started Calling My Personality

Somewhere along the way he stopped waiting for something and started being a man who waits.

You can hear it in how he talks. There is a particular sentence he uses, and he uses it lightly, and it always gets a small laugh in the right kind of company.

Oh, I have given up expecting anything.

He has not, actually. That is the strange thing. If you sat with him at a gate for two hours you would find the hope is still in there, buried under about fourteen years of protective wrapping, and it is in remarkably good condition considering.

But the sentence has done its work.

Because a sentence you say about yourself often enough stops being a report and becomes a wall. And then people believe it about you, which is the least of it. And then you believe it about you, which is worse. And then, finally, and this is the part that really costs, you start choosing things that fit it.

He does not go to the meetings that might stir something. He has a reason. He has several reasons and every one of them is true and none of them is the reason.

He is not protecting himself from disappointment. He is protecting a coat he has been wearing for fourteen years, because if the thing ever moved he would not know who he was in the morning.

Now put him down and think about your own conversation.

When did the waiting stop being something you were doing and start being something you are?

David said what he did and not what he was

There is a psalm that opens with three sentences that a lot of us have heard and very few of us have watched carefully.

I waited patiently for the Lord; He turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.Psalm 40:1 and 2

Now, the thing everybody quotes is the rock. And the rock is real and it is coming.

But look at the very first clause, and look at the grammar of it, because it is doing something you need.

I waited. That is a verb. It is a thing he did. It is not an adjective and it is not a noun and it is not a description of a category of man.

Nowhere in that psalm does David say I am a waiting man. He says he waited, which is an activity, in a period, with a beginning, and the whole reason he can describe it at all is that he is now standing somewhere else.

And there is one more detail in the Hebrew that I like, and I will not make a meal of it. The phrase is a doubled one. Waiting, I waited. It is the shape that language uses for emphasis, the way we would say I waited and I waited, and it is the honest sound of a long time.

He does not pretend it was short. He doubles the word.

Now hear where that puts you, standing at a gate with fourteen years on you.

You are not a category of person. Scripture puts waiting in the verb and never in the noun, and the Spirit has never once handed anybody a permanent identity made out of a delay.

And I want to say the plain thing, the way you would want it said, with no flourish on it.

The coat is not humility and it is not realism, whatever it says on the label. It is armor. You put it on because hoping out loud in front of people got expensive, and it worked, and it has kept you from a great deal of embarrassment for fourteen years.

I am not going to mock you for that. It was a reasonable thing to do and I would probably have done the same.

And you are not a man who has run out of hope, whatever the label on the coat says. The word says he waited and then he was lifted, and the Spirit has kept something alive in you under fourteen years of wrapping, which is why you are still reading this at a gate instead of laughing it off.

But armor is heavy and it is not the same shape as a man, and the word says he waited and then he was lifted, and the lifting is done by somebody else in that sentence and never by the man in the pit.

You do not have to generate hope to take the coat off. That is not what is being asked. You only have to stop introducing yourself as the thing you are wearing.

So you are not a category of person. Psalm 40 puts waiting in the verb and never in the noun, and the Spirit has never handed anybody a permanent name made out of a delay.