Waiting

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 22 February 2008 10:58:16

I'm currently just waiting, knowing that to a great extent what direction my future will go in is currently out of my hands. It's a wierd place to be in a kind of void where I have to be carrying on planning; and looking towards the next academic year as if nothing is going to change, but knowing if I am successful everything will change.

To get to this point I have had to truly examine my motivations, my dreams, my abilities, my strengths and my weaknesses.

But, now, as I say I am in a time of just waiting. To be honest I don't know what I fear most rejection or acceptance because whilst one will undoubtedly hit me hard in some of the places I am most vunerable the other will require a level of courage and self-belief that I know I must have within me, but am yet to truly recognise. Acceptance will also be evidence to me, atleast, that the mad "calling" I have burning inside of me to promote inclusion within churches through identifying existing good practice and helping break silences by opening eyes to existing positive situations may actually be just that and not something to be dismissed as easily as I sometimes try.

Within this situation there has, inevitably, been a fair amount of talk about God opening and closing doors as is right. This is something I believe in as a concept, yet I am realising it is a glib term that we often throw about as Christians about life decisions, which whilst globally small, are actually quite important to the individuals involved. To push the doors in the first place often requires courage and so to then have the strength of mind to honestly say it's ok if you slam it right back in my face or keep it tight shut God is something that requires a greater faith than I have to say I have. Yet it is an honest prayer in it's own way. Whilst we may want something so passionately it hurts (and to be prepared to make the sacrifices sometimes required if the door opens requires that passion) we also equally passionately mean it when we say we want to follow God and go on the adventures he has planned for our lives in order to glorify him.

I know what I have discovered this Lent is the power and confusion that the type of passionate longing I have just described gives and the way having to take time to wait intensifies that power and confusion. I know that I will never be able to remotely know or get my head round Jesus went through / was doing in the desert, but what this experience has made me wonder is how his mind didn't explode. The wonder this is because Lent is a period of waiting and waiting is not an easy process, as I am finding out.