Good Enough to Make Us Wait

I'm opening up this post, and I see my last post was February 6th. It doesn't feel that long, but also somehow longer. A post from the other side of another life. Depression does that, lets the river run away with you, without you.

And I've been thinking about keystone habits, the changes that make the others fall in like dominoes, and for me that is journaling. My blog always comes right out of my journal, my truthiest place, and even though my journal has been empty I have a hundred pages of words I wrote before. On the other side.

So today, and in days to come, I'll be posting these words that I barely recognize as my own. I'll be, as Ann Voskamp says, preaching to the one who needs it most. Always myself.

This morning as I stood in front of my bathroom mirror I kept thinking of one line I knew I had written: Sometimes love is good enough to make us wait. One of my favorite quotes is, "Love understands, and therefore waits." I don't know why this resonates with me so deeply, except that it seems to echo grace. There is, in the waiting, acceptance.

I flipped through my old pages until I found these words. The message I preach to myself today.


I wish I had known I was capable of making good decisions.

I grew up in a land of hard edges and lines. Things were black and white. Right or wrong. Yes or no. There was always someone willing, too willing, to speak for me, to turn my head. There were too many voicessaying they spoke for a God I couldn't hear from my place in the gray.

I wish I had know I could hear and taste and see or myself, because when I left the voices behind, I was lost. How do you know who you are when everything that defined you is gone? How do you even know how to speak?

I had to build a new foundation, start from the ground up.

If your voice is lost today, sit still and quiet. Be with the uneasiness that rises up. Don't go looking for another voice to speak God to you. Just sit and wait. Let the restlessness rise and the shadows fall.

There is too much talk. Too much chatter and opinion and fence-making. The noise is deafening, but the Voice isn't in the noise.

Stay and listen into the silence.

Sometimes love is good enough to make us wait.