Waiting Unwell
Waiting isn’t the time for tranquility. It is the invitation to practice resistance.
By S.A. Morrison
I grew up in Texas, where the bluebonnets grow around the time storms roll through, bringing the promise of tornados. Spring tells the story of storms and blooms, April showers and May flowers. When I was a child, the thunderclaps shook me awake and strong winds blew me to the comfort of my parents’ room.
As certainly as I ran to my parents during storms, I was also terrified that they—or anyone for that matter—might run away from me. They had not given me reason to think so, but I had told myself the story of my unlovableness; that, if given the chance, anyone would prefer to be without me than with me.
With age, I came to understand the specificity of this fear. More than merely being left, I fear abandonment of the mind—being forgotten, misremembered, or unremembered. Being lost by someone else, with that person at peace with what’s missing. In cruel ways, I’ve told myself over and again that maybe my absence from their lives is the only way others will actually be whole.
I was told that the seconds in between the flash of a lightning bolt and the boom of thunder let us know how many miles away the strike kissed earth. I’ve probably spent months of my life counting the Mississippis in between strike and rumble; twenty Mississippis away was so much safer than five, and this metric ruled my childhood. Further cementing its reign, I glued myself to the weather channel with insistence that I must be the first to hear the awful drawl of an emergency alert.
So it can go in life—a vague email or offhand remark from a friend is still enough to push me to the end of my tolerance, the edges of which are worn and ripped like the silk border of my baby blanket, worn so because its softness soothed me. My fears, when I’m forced to sit within them, cause me to thumb the edges of my very being, my just existing. Yes, thunderstorms and the specter of being forgotten now feel like close friends. Compadres. Thick as thieves are we.
I regret not learning sooner that these unrelated things told the story of inextricable parts of myself—that waiting in a bathtub covered with quilts under a tornado warning was the same as waiting to hear if my name was remembered was the same as waiting to see if God’s eyes could slip off me. Could those eyes that held the whole world together soften their gaze, blur their focus, and gently fall off me without a sound or sign? Would I even know if those eyes tumbled away? Would being caught in a tornado’s fury prove one thing or the other? Or would my friend forget my birthday, and would that mean I’m no longer wanted or that they never loved me at all? Sheltering from storms and waiting to be loved is all time spent the same way, time spent resisting a future I cannot imagine living, a future where I’m hurtled into the heavens, or a future of being abandoned even by memory.
I’ve made phantoms out of guilt over being unwell when I’m waiting, ghouls out of shame, and tombs out of my weakness.
There is a whole world bound up in the liminal space between what is now and what will be. Waiting shifts the world’s plates, creating a cavern of time which I easily fill with scenarios of all sorts. The longer the waiting lingers, the more calamities I conjure, the more my misfit imagination contorts what is true to manufacture the untrue. Waiting feels stale at best. At worst, it’s like legs too-long crossed and fallen asleep, yet on which you must walk miles still, calves pinched by imaginary pins. No, I’ve never thrived in seasons that demand waiting. They squeeze too much.
I grew tall and strong under the apprenticeship of holy resolve, taught that those imprecise moments between where you are and where you want to be (or where you hope you won’t be) are spaces meant for tranquility and poise. Those slices of time require your excellence. Your waiting will be graded, and maybe even affect the outcome of whatever it is you’re waiting for. These opportunities can grow that mustard seed or baptize you in that refining fire. Vague placations of being still or trusting or refined during periods of waiting still haunt me like ghosts. They are bitter on my tongue and a plague on my ever-wavering spirit. I’ve made phantoms out of guilt over being unwell when I’m waiting, ghouls out of shame, and tombs out of my weakness.
I resist waiting because I resist unwanted outcomes. I long for the earth to be soft enough to absorb the weight of burden I carry through life. As much as I want the ground to feel like a sponge, as much as my ankles cry out for something to absorb the shock of life, I’m relentlessly shown that this world holds no such luxury.
Instead, I find myself waiting unwell. More trapped than chosen to exist within that claustrophobic place. It would be far more pleasant to be at peace, even if feigned.
But I wonder what grace there might be if I shifted from hating the parts of myself that react viscerally against waiting to seeing what outcomes might befall my weary life. If I search the landscape of waiting, upturning every rock with tenderness, what beautiful things might I find awaiting me?
At long last, I have come to question the methods of madness that have soaked into my daily practice. After all, who among us would not sprint to a windowless room when the winds begin screaming like a freight train? And who would not collapse at the knowledge that those whom they love most do not return that love? Who can keep still when asked to see what might come of their lives upturned—whether in seconds, in months, or years down the line? And if no saint comes to mind who would or could withstand such pressure, I then ask this: who is the arbiter of waiting, and why ought we push against the grain of our very inclination, intuition, and instinct?
It seems right that any knee jerk reaction I have tells a story of wounds, losses, and the chemistry of my own being. And I want to say, I even want to believe, that waiting well is necessarily giving yourself permission to wrestle with the absurdity of life’s landscape, surrendering unnatural calm and replacing it with the guttural groans of our soul.
When my head slams against the flesh of God’s palm, I find a soft pillow for my head to rest.
My resistance looks like fighting and thrashing. When my head slams against the flesh of God’s palm, I find a soft pillow for my head to rest. When my hands writhe and scratch, I find his hand’s hollow in which he’s carried every tear I’ve cried. When my heels dig in and find no hold, when my thrown elbows find no weakness, I find his persistent presence which is unable to be harmed by anything I do. Had my head not whipped, my hands not searched, my elbows and heels not hit, I would have only ever known such things of God in word, but not in deed.
When waiting feels like a waste of time and space, when it makes me feel like I am a waste, I find myself made alive in the ruckus of the soul. It is only in the friction of waiting that I have seen the goodness of it. It is only in letting myself hate the waiting, crying and kicking and screaming, that I have seen the medicine it can be. My fears seem to be in no rush to run off; and they still daily teach me of my insecurity, distrust, and impatience. Yet, they are ebenezers of the security of being a bug in God’s hand. Caught, captured, trapped, and chosen to be there, buzzing and bouncing within his walls. Harsh and bitter, but medicine no less.
I think that God knows how impossible it is for us to confront the fact that we do not know what is best for us, and how seemingly impossible it is to hope for goodness when the veil of suffering obscures our lives. Yet in all of its impossibleness, I think we survive, even flourish, by God’s permission to test the limitlessness of his care, and the boundlessness of his presence. How else can we believe that we are not forsaken than for God himself to appear in the desolate waste land of our waiting?
After all, there is no one thing promised as “best” for us. No hierarchy of all possible outcomes. There are simply things that happen to us or don’t, and each happening demands its own type of waiting. There are tornados that rip our lives apart, and there are some that never appear. There are friendships written in pencil and some in ink. There are outcomes to hope for and others to dread. But more surely than any of these things, there is a space carved out for us between where we are and where we will be, a space to grapple and scream and seek and find—to find that goodness exists in the vestibule of waiting.
S.A. Morrison is a writer living in the rust belt with her daughter and husband. Her writing has appeared in Fathom Magazine, Ekstasis Magazine, and a smattering of blogs. Her first book, With Those Who Weep: A Theology of Tears, was released in June 2021.
