I am so tired of waiting for joy.
I am so tired of saying that life will be great when ______.
When I meet my husband.
When I finish school.
When we have children.
When Amelia gets home.
When our finances change. (not that we lack!)
When my schedule clears.
When my work situation is different.
When this.
When that.
When
when
when
when
THIS is the life I am living. Here and now. And it is a gift from a God who loves me more than my tiny brain can fathom. A gift so big, I can only unwrap it in tiny layers, and I haven’t even begun to see a drop of this Life’s glory. (Because He is the Life.) Do I think I deserve something better than the oceans of grace He has flooded onto my life?
I AM TIRED OF WAITING.
I am DONE waiting for joy.
I remember when we were waiting for Amelia, God began to whisper to my heart that I wasn’t REALLY waiting for Amelia. He whispered this to my heart: “You are waiting to see ME.” Yes. I see now that I was! And wow… how He is now showing Himself to my open, starving, begging-for-more-of-Him heart.
I thought we would see God most in the wait. In the trial. But oh, thank You God! The real miracles in this heart of stone I carry have begun in the days since we got home. God is going to change me. I know He is. He wants to show Himself to me. To us. To whomever is hungry for the Only True Joy.
I will leave you with an incredible quote from the book I am currently obsessed with. I now think this: During the painful darkness of our adoption wait, I was in the cleft of the rock, being shielded from God’s consuming glory by His covering hand. But now… oh chilling miracle… He has lifted His hand so I can look upon the back of a Holy God passing by.
Wasn’t that too His way with Moses? “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back” (Exodus 33:22-23 NIV)
Is that it? When it gets dark, it’s only because God has tucked me in a cleft of the rock an covered me, protected, with His hand? In the pitch, I feel like I’m falling, sense the bridge giving way, God long absent. In the dark, the bridge and my world shakes, cracking dreams. But maybe this is the true reality: It is in the dark that God is passing by. The bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can’t see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us, I-beam supporting an earthquake. Then He will remove His hand. Then we will look.
Then we will look back and see His back.
Yes, God. Help us look back and see YOU.
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Rachel has been married to her husband Brad for 5 years. They have a 3 year old named Caroline and a 1 year old named Amelia, whom they recently brought home from Uganda. God has used Amelia and adoption to show His love and glory to the Goode family. You can follow their story on their blog.