Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written a post.  Between Thanksgiving, the end of the semester, and working through some deep things that the Lord is doing in my own heart, it’s been hard to think of writing profound spiritual truth out for all the world to see.

Part of the problem is that my relationship with God has been pretty dry lately.  I’m not necessarily experiencing profound spiritual truth myself, so it seems rather deceptive to post something that I’m not experiencing.  I just want all you folks out there who think people in full-time ministry always have amazing, wonderful, productive, loving, fruitful time with God to know that – well, I’m just as human as the next person.  Sometimes I love God, but sometimes I know that the only reason I’m even a Christian is because God is faithful to keep me one.

Most of what I’ve been hearing from the Lord lately has been a very still, small, so-quiet-I-can-barely-hear-it “wait.”  Wait for what?  Why do I need to wait?  Why can’t You reveal Yourself to me now, God?  And yet He continues to tell me to wait.

It’s like winter.  Everything around seems cold and lifeless, but somewhere underneath, life is brewing.  And to this hope I cling.  Well, actually, there’s not much clinging on my part.  It’s more like in this hope I wait, because the life it seems to offer on the other side is entrancing.

But the fact is, I’m experiencing life in other places.  Maybe spring is closer than I think.  I’ve started dating a wonderful man who tells me all the time how much he enjoys me, who pursues me with wisdom and passion, who is tender and honest and strong and handsome.  And in this relationship, I’m actually experiencing what I’ve known intellectually for a long time to be true of God’s character: His desires to pursue me, His love for me.

I’m learning a lot of things across the board really, but I think I’m primarily learning to see the differences between what was simply an ideal in my mind and what is real.  Perhaps this is why the Lord tells me to wait.  This shift must take a while, from living in a world of ideals to living in a world of reality.  It’s not something that happens overnight.

But I think that, although in some ways harder, reality is actually better.  More fulfilling.  So if it takes a while for me to shift from seeing God as an intellectual Ideal to experiencing Him as a more fulfilling Reality, so be it.

So.  What will life look like when winter is past?  I don’t know.  But my expectation is that, like the seasons, spring will come around again.  I’ve been here before.  And the Lord hasn’t left me yet.  So in this hope I wait.  After all, as a very wise man once put it, “hope that is seen is no hope at all.  Who hopes for what he already has?  But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”  (Romans 8, of course.)

Here’s to the hope that God is much more than I ever thought or even dreamed.  Yes, in this hope I wait.