What do I do in the waiting? - Part 1
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What do I do in the Waiting?
The questions of complex transitions
As we were wrapping up an initial consultation, a potential client recently asked me, “So, what do I do now while I wait?” We had spent the previous 45 minutes talking about the difficult transition they were in & the lack of fit for the husband while the wife was thriving. I gathered a sense of expansive understanding to the openness of both time and untapped energy that permeated his question. I was invited to an internal pause. While I could answer with a quick appeasement something like, “Wait with intentionality!” I felt a deep sense that his question came from a different place than a child fighting off boredom while waiting for a guest to arrive. This question was likely a daily, hourly, nagging, question in his mind. And not just a question related to time but something so much more compelling. I imagined underlying the simple question of “What should I do in the waiting?” resonated a sound like a base drum - a deeper, harder to answer question about core identity and purpose.
I sensed that without purposeful response, this unwelcome intrusion of a question would not easily go away. I couldn’t help but empathize with intense sadness. I felt this conversation ignite in me a painful visceral, not-all-that-distant memory and response. I felt the question in my gut. I resonated with the desperate longing to be useful. To be noticed for one’s unique skillset. The natural inborn desire to be invited to a table to share a unique point of view. To be asked to show up with a voice that is welcomed. To contribute the expression of creation that only my unique fingerprints could create.
I couldn’t help but feel that this question daily nagged my transition companion. And yet like any coach might do, I turned his question into an opportunity to dig deeper. “What do you think you should do in the waiting? And secondly…what does your wife think you should do?”
It wasn’t meant to be a cop-out. Coaches are often asked questions back; often the ones the client doesn’t want to answer. And yet on the flip side many coaches go into a coaching or care profession waiting for the moment to be asked his/her opinion. If we’re honest we’d rather be consultants and give quick answers and we’d rather share ideas and solutions! Yet here I sat together with my fellow sojourner, in the complexity of his painful transition without a lot of answers and certainty of what to do next. Yet I could respond with a presence of familiarity and a knowing it won’t last forever to validate and feel alongside him the deep pain in the not knowing and in the waiting in between.
And now here as I write, I suppose I wear the hat of a consultant, not as much a coach. I share my ideas a little more openly at first with just my computer…not sure where they’ll land or who will read them or relate. My story not that unlike his - consisted of that redundant and not-always-answered question “God, what do you want me to do in the waiting?” For almost 2 full years (if not longer), it was for me a daily gnawing at my core identity question especially when the calendar was empty and the phone didn’t ring. I felt alone - people don’t really like to talk about that in-between place of isolation and the reality of what it actually looks like to be waiting. And yet, in hindsight, I recognize I often did hear a response. I heard an invitation to new disciplines. Over the course of many months and years, despite long days of silence, these are a few of the disciplines I was invited to discover in my time of long waiting:
7 playlists I created in 2017-2019 coinciding with each of the 6 transition themes. Find them on iTunes & Spotify “The Way Between - Limitations”
1. Praise – Praise turns my heart on. I hear the mandate of scripture: “In all things give thanks”. “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Noticing the beauty in life, the good that I’ve been given, takes intentionality and discipline. And yet here my heart, like David’s in Psalms does not want to rejoice. I hear the voices of literary mentors say, “Thanks is what multiples joy and makes any life large”. I admit, it does not come natural for me. So I turn to those who’ve penned lyrics of pain and married them with the life-giving instruments of worship acknowledging a place of surrender. I listened, and listened some more to the hymns and to the modern day poets give their doubts and unmet longings to God in praise. Time after time as if this was my prescription - this posture of worship changed me. It calmed me like unlike anything else. It brought me to a place of holding open all that I could not control. It’s not all about me or my unmet longings. God is in the business of transforming my heart by giving me this grand pause. Can I see it as a gift and give it back to him in worship? He held me in it and he performed healing in places of my heart that really needed some deep surgery.
“Thankfulness is what multiplies joy and makes any life large”-Ann Voskamp
2. Play – I learned to embrace, like my children, the present. My propensity being a forward-facing and actively moving thought life, the future is where my mind and body naturally want to go. The present can often feel stifling & uncomfortable to me. Yet I recall my word for that year - excitable! Not a word anyone has ever used to describe me!! Yet when I think about a person who is excitable, I conjure up positive thoughts of people that I love being around! In hindsight, I recognize I was being invited into a practice of mindfulness. A call to notice and to enjoy the every moment. A call to attend to my inner child and just enjoy what or who was in front of me. This invitation was for me was a summoning to play! Turn life into a joyful game. Play encouraged me to stop to embrace the joy of just being and not focus on doing anything or becoming anything. Whether through an Uno game with my 5 year-old or a more adult game of strategy, drawing, wrestling, or just responding to enter a pool with a cannonball instead of a careful wade. I was (and am) continually implored to enjoy my life in the moment even with all its pain and uncertainty.
3. Explore – be curious and remain open. As I began to write I just brain-dumped my thoughts on paper day after day. I wasn’t strict about it. And I didn’t intend for it to go anywhere. And yet as I kept writing I felt like my words gained some momentum. Maybe not worth sharing with others. But maybe. I surrounded myself with my spiritual and literary mentors; those who spoke eloquently and articulately with words on paper and poets of music like I mentioned before.
When I got stuck I would read. I read what inspired me to think differently, grander thoughts. I read people who played with words in a way I had not been comfortable doing. I explored new ways of adding color to thoughts that I felt only others knew how to do. In this I stumbled and I stuttered and it was clunky. But I persisted and I gained new life every time I did. I explored new creation through exercise and movement and I explored new ways of thinking. I took what I already knew and I expanded on that pushed boundaries of my imagination in a way that I had felt stifled in in the past. What was provoked in me was the designer side of me that had been dormant. In that creative, playful, exploratory space came the creation of what is now my primary work - The Art of Transition.
The period of waiting in transition has been such a long long season for me. I often felt like I did as a child in the endless snowy climate of Minnesota – will summer ever come? And like a bear moving out of hibernation, I’m ecstatic to see that spring is here for me and summer on the horizon! And for those in the waiting of in between: Though the winter is long, I believe your season will come.
—to be continued
“If all I know of harvest is that it’s worth my patience. Then if you’re not done working, God I’m not done waiting”
Like the frost on a rose
Winter comes for us all
Oh how nature acquaints us
With the nature of patience
Like a seed in the snow
I’ve been buried to grow
For your promise is loyal
From seed to sequoia
I know | Though the winter is long even richer | The harvest it brings | Though my waiting prolongs even greater | Your promise for me like a seed | I believe that my season will come
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Lord I think of Your love
Like the low winter sun
As I gaze I am blinded
In the light of Your brightness
Like a fire to the snow
I’m renewed in Your warmth
Melt the ice of this wild soul
Till the barren is beautiful
I know | Though the winter is long even richer | The harvest it brings | Though my waiting prolongs even greater | Your promise for me like a seed | I believe that my season will come
———
I can see the promise | I can see the future | You’re the God of seasons | I’m just in the winter | If all I know of harvest | Is that it’s worth my patience | Then if You’re not done working | God I’m not done waiting | You can see my promise | Even in the winter | Cause you’re the God of greatness | Even in a manger | All I know of seasons | Is that you take your time | You could have saved us in a second | Instead you sent a child
The barren is beautiful
Though the winter is long even richer
The harvest it brings
Though my waiting prolongs even greater
Your promise for me like a seed
I believe that my season will come
And when I finally see my tree
Still I believe there’s a season to come
Like a seed You were sown
For the sake of us all
From Bethlehem’s soil
Grew Calvary’s sequoia
