Some Thoughts on Waiting

A Short Update On the Process of Buying a Bookstore but Really On Waiting

Van Gogh’s “Landscape With Snow”

Waiting time is not wasting time.
Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.

Henri Nouwen

And so we wait. When we first found excitement at the idea of buying a bookstore, there was a momentum behind that excitement that promised to speed us through every hurdle, every possible setback, every barrier between us and this dream. That excitement promised a quick resolution, and near-immediate attainment of the dream.

But the momentum of early excitement promises many things that it simply cannot fulfill. Major undertakings take time.

We continue to hope we can take over this bookstore, but we now find ourselves waiting to hear back about bank financing. We wait to see if we qualify to borrow the money we need (one bank has already said, Yeah, no thanks, you don’t look like a very good bet). I didn’t take it personally. I can understand the sentiment.

We wait.

There are also other areas of life where we are waiting, and Maile and I feel this most sharply in our waiting to hear back from a publisher who has shown signs of interest in Maile’s middle-grade novel. For years and years and years, Maile has written faithfully and revised and sent out her manuscript (well, her agent has), and for years there has been nothing or maybe a small comment here or there but until recently, not much. Then, at the end of last year, serious interest. A wonderful publisher. A request for revisions.

We wait.

Ironic that we should be doing all this waiting during the liminal season of Lent, and especially during Holy Week, when we wait for the king, who ends up dying, and then we wait in the dark, which ends in resurrection.

“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life,” writes Henri Nouwen. And I feel this at a deep level.

Patiently. Expectation. I am reminded of Rick Rubin’s words: “Impatience is arguing with reality.” If that’s true, perhaps patience is entering fully into reality, this present moment, and simply being here.

I find that there is something in me that chafes against waiting, that will do just about anything to remove the uncertainty and extricate myself from this season of uncertainty. In a world where I rarely have to truly wait for anything, a season like this feels unnecessarily painful.

There’s even an element of self-sabatoge that threatens to come into play, where something in me argues, It’s not worth it, give up on the dream, it would be preferable to simply walk away than to sit here in this extreme discomfort and continue waiting. It probably won’t happen anyway, so what are you waiting for?

Amazing, isn’t it, that we would give up on a dream simply in order to remove ourselves from an uncomfortable season of waiting?

And yet here we are. We continue to wait.

I love these words about waiting, also from Henri Nouwen:

Most of us consider waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The bus is late? We cannot do anything about it, so we have to sit there and just wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when somebody says, “Just wait.” Words like that push us into passivity.

But there is none of this passivity in Scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. Right here is a secret for us about waiting. If we wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted and that something has already begun, it changes the way we wait. Active waiting implies being fully present to the moment with the conviction that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, believing that this moment is the moment.

Henri Nouwen

I love so much about that quote.

I love the idea that what I’m waiting for is already growing beneath me, that no matter the outcome, this waiting is bringing something into existence that would not otherwise occur. Can I stand on this ground, patient, active, fully present?

I love the idea that something is happening, has, in fact, already begun! I think I’m waiting for a particular outcome, but here, in the waiting, something has already come to life.

Can I open my eyes to it?

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I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get the money we need. I don’t know. So much I don’t know.

But my eyes have been opened to the things that are happening, not at the end of the process when all things are resolved and we know the outcome, but here and now, in this very moment. That’s an exciting way to wait. That’s an exciting way to live.

How do you wait?