Wait: Thoughts and Practice in Waiting on God

Dedication

For Richard and Susan Brewster

my parents

Introduction

"Seek and you will find. It will be in His own time.

He is a lover, not a train."

–Peter Kreeft

For two of my childhood years, we lived in a small fishing village on the Japan Sea. Our house, along with the fifty or so identical houses in the compound, sat at the farthest reach of this village. My family had no car: bicycles were good enough to get us to store and school; my father, along with all the neighbors who worked at the Takahama Power Plant, rode the bus to work.

Otherwise, we went by train.

Even in 1977, a train could get you almost anywhere in Japan. The lines were local and express, and if you wanted to get far especially fast, you could go by bullet train.

Almost weekly, my family and I made a trip to Maizuru. After the all-neighborhood Sunday school my parents held at our house, we would mount our bicycles and pedal the eight-minute trek to the Wada train station. From there it was a twenty-minute train-ride to Maizuru, where we spent the afternoon with some Japanese friends.

No one else in our little neighborhood of ex-patriots did this. Of course I can’t be sure what they did with their Sunday afternoons, but I know I envied them. Not because I didn’t enjoy the almost weekly jaunts to a city as comparatively large as Maizuru. I loved the automat with its egg-salad sandwiches and soft-serve vanilla ice cream. And I loved our friends in Maizuru: all of them English-speaking Japanese. Their traditional homes and storefronts and farm became almost second-nature to my five-six-seven-year-old self.

No, I didn’t envy my fellow ex-pat neighbors their Sunday afternoons at home. What I envied was that so many of them—if not all—had their own car.

• • •

My family and I went everywhere by train. Several times a year, we made the trip to visit missionary friends in Kyoto; several times a year, we made the trip to visit missionary friends in Tokyo. And between these visits, we went elsewhere: Niko, Osaka, Kobe. We visited temples and gardens, watched ceremonial parades. My parents climbed Mount Fuji.

Train travel meant that, once we arrived at our destined city, we walked everywhere. We never took a cab. My little sister was still a baby, and she rode in a carrier on my father’s back, but my older sister and I walked. I wonder how many miles we logged on Japanese terrain before we were ten years old.

All of this was fine. I didn’t complain about the walking, because walking was how we lived in Japan. But I did audibly and many times wish for a car.

I don’t remember how my parents responded to this, but I imagine cheerful indifference. A car, I can imagine them saying, was an unnecessary expense.

I actually enjoyed traveling by train. I grew accustomed to the rattle of the ride, if not to the rush and thunder that came with passing between cars in motion. The train stations, smelling of metal and cigarettes, were swept and accessible. And time on board the train was fun: our father read to us; we ate sushi from bento boxes; we colored; we watched innumerable rice paddies slide past the window.

What I didn’t like about train travel was what came before it: the hurry, the sometimes having to run blocks of a town or city into the train station, the panicked delay at the ticket counter, the pell-mell rush down the stairs or through the tiled hallways to our platform where sat the waiting train with—if we were lucky—the doors still open.

Trains are always on time in Japan. I imagine it’s a courtesy: the train says it will arrive at this time, and you will reach your destination at that time. It would be impolite—dishonorable, even—to miss those clear expectations. My father said it more than once of the trains in Japan: if your train is late in arriving at your platform, you are on the wrong platform.

Occasionally we arrived early to the train station. Weary from walking, we had nothing to do but wait. I had a lesson in time this way. It was late and the day had been long. I asked my dad how long it would be until the train came.

About fifteen minutes, he said.

Mentally, I did that quick math. Fifteen minutes wasn’t so long, I thought. I just had to count to sixty—relatively slowly—fifteen times. I sat on a bench and began counting. Four minutes in, I realized that fifteen minutes was actually a very long time. To a fatigued seven-year-old, it was tediously long.

Once we were returning to Wada after a trip away. This was not our weekly excursion to Maizuru: we were in a town we’d never visited before, taking an unfamiliar route.

And this time we were late getting to the station. My father, with one sister on his back and the other sister gripping his hand, was several yards ahead of my mother and me. We hurried after them, trying to keep them in view as we dodged fellow travelers. They reached the train well ahead of us. We watched them slip through the train’s waiting doors.

And just before we got there, those doors closed. My mother and I arrived at the train seconds before it pulled away. I remember standing with my mother, my hand tight in hers, staring at my father and sisters who stared back at us through the glass.

We had no way to communicate; this was long before cell phones. Moreover, my parents didn’t know if this train was local or express, or whether the next train would follow the same route. Would it stop at the next station, or might one of the trains continue on past several stops? And how could we know how to follow? If we took the next train, would the rest of our family be waiting in the next town, or would they still be traveling away from us?

A train conductor noticed our plight. I’m sure it was difficult not to: a family of gaijin among the Japanese, divided from one another by the closed doors.

In an act of kindness and likely unprecedented delay, the conductor pressed a button to open the doors and we, overwhelmed with relief, stepped inside.

• • •

Again, it was nothing about the trains themselves that I wanted to avoid. It wasn’t that I attached a kind of prestige to owning a car. I simply didn’t want to wait for the train, and I didn’t want the panic, the fear, or the potential disappointment that came with being late.

I remember saying to my father, by way of justification, of explaining why he should make said purchase: You can’t miss your own car.

I was always afraid of missing the train.

• • •

This is a book about waiting, not trains—or cars, for that matter. But if waiting is about control—or a lack of it—then so was my experience with trains.

I think children know a thing or two about waiting. I’m guessing you do, too. I’ve done a considerable amount of waiting myself. In fact, I am still waiting—and learning a thing or two in the meantime. It’s those things I’m learning that this book is about.

One—Exile

Nobody tells you when you get born here

How much you’ll come to love it

And how you’ll never belong here.

–Rich Mullins

We sat on the floor of my family’s living room while my mother taught the lesson. She sat with us, holding up a poster she had made: a large drawing of a traffic light.

I don’t remember what traffic lights were like in Japan, but a standard American traffic light would do. Most of the children in the room found it familiar enough that it worked as an object lesson.

My mother held Sunday school almost every week during the two and a half years we lived in Japan. I know that almost every gaijin child living in our small neighborhood came. Once we had an Easter egg hunt. Another time we enjoyed root beer floats. I’m sure that, weekly, we sang songs and read Bible stories and played a game or two.

But the only lesson I recall is the one with the traffic light. It was a lesson on prayer.

God answers our prayers, my mother said, and he does so in one of three ways. Sometimes he says Yes (the green light), and sometimes he says No (the red light). And sometimes—the yellow light—he says Wait.

Not a flawless metaphor, but even as a young child, I knew how to weigh some of this. Yes is what we’re going for. To my child mind, it meant getting what I wanted. And No I recognized as the worst answer—with the degree of disappointment dependent on what one was asking for.

But what of Wait?

That yellow light on my mother’s poster surprised me. I was six years old. I can’t claim much of my awareness at the time, but I know that I’ve never forgotten it—and I’ve forgotten countless Sunday school lessons over the years.

In truth, I can’t remember what I thought about that lesson, except that the yellow traffic light—the potential Wait—made God seem more real to me. He was not, after all, like the automat in Maizuru: a machine operating just outside my vision, dispensing responses based on my input and desire.

After that lesson, I knew that God was something more than that—something I couldn’t see and certainly couldn’t understand. But he was clearly something more.

• • •

I’ve never heard anyone say that they enjoy waiting. Granted, people might enjoy meaningful ways to pass the time. But the waiting itself?

I’m not talking about waiting for a meeting to start, a program to proceed, or a train to arrive. In each of these cases, the wait might be long, but it has an established end.

No, I’m talking about that other kind of waiting—the one with hopes clearly in view and no practical way of reaching them. This kind of waiting is an endurance game, its players charged with energy, passion, focus, zeal—and nowhere to put them. In these scenarios, waiting is readiness snagged on inaction, all interest and ardor curbed.

Normally, readiness precipitates action; to delay the process from one to the next feels unnatural, at best. It can be painful. And often, the longer one waits, the more difficult the waiting becomes.

What are you waiting for?

I have a friend who is waiting to be married. She isn’t in a relationship; no potential spouse crests her horizon. But she wants that partner in life, that significant other who prefers her above all else. To reference the brilliant When Harry Met Sally, she wants a date on national holidays. Her friends are getting married, and her calendar is marked with bachelorette weekends and bridal luncheons—all for brides who aren’t her.

I have a friend whose husband needs a job. It’s been several years now of living on unemployment and any additional money she can earn by caring for other people’s children in addition to her own. She watches her husband in a mixture of hope and sadness as he searches the internet and goes to interviews.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be pregnant. Meanwhile, it seemed like everyone around me was joyfully announcing their pregnancies. I likely bought a score of pregnancy tests over those years; my husband suggested