The .Plan

When I drove to work this morning, for the first time in many weeks I didn’t change lanes to pass other cars, not even once. I didn’t change to the left lane when the car in front of me slowed down to make a right turn. I didn’t change to the right lane when the car in front of me stopped while trying to make a left turn on a busy 4-lane street. I didn’t change to the left lane when the little old lady was still in the crosswalk when the light turned green. It was a funny feeling.

Life in the city is busy and full of doing. But the rest of the world does not live like this.

If you spend much time in the country, you are used to waiting. Each year, we wait for the corn to come up, the pigs to put on weight, the potatoes to mature, the river to go down, the ground to thaw out, the rain to come, the rain to stop (I’m sure that’s a shout out to us in the Pacific Northwest), and the weather to clear for haying. Nothing is immediate. Everything is in the process of becoming… We just have to learn to be patient, to know that our time is spent in transition, in waiting rooms of our imagination. And then, one day, we wake up and realize that the sap isn’t going to run. There will be no boil, no steam, and no syrup… I guess we had better learn to enjoy the waiting.
–Christopher Kimball, “Waiting for the Run”, Cooks Illustrated

When time passes me by, I have been trained to think of that time as wasted time. After all, I live amongst a people that glorifies the urge to do something. I watch movies whose heroes are named “Action Jackson”, and “Tom Cruise“. And I work in a world where there is no such thing as bad timing, one that teaches that you must aggressively seek what you want while trading elbows with other people who want the same thing.

Thus formed, it is a small wonder that I get impatient with myself when I am waiting on God. Oftentimes the more difficult thing to do is to wait and to know that, amidst the uncertainty, God is doing the doing. I realize that what I lack is not only clarity with regard to being in the here-and-now but also the faith to understand and internalize that God will help me grow into the commitments I make — as well as the courage to actually make those commitments in the absence of certainty.

The new issue of First Things has an essay by Fr. Neuhaus that touched me deeply:

We are all uncertain about what God wants us to do. That is to say, we do not know for sure. Of course it seems silly, when you’re well past middle age and have spent your life doing what you believe you’ve been given to do, to always be getting up in the morning or suddenly stopping in the middle of the day’s work to ask, ‘Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?’ I mentioned this to a young man who is discerning whether he has a call to the priesthood, and he was shocked, perhaps scandalized. He said, in effect, ‘You mean after all these years of being a priest, of writing books, of editing and lecturing, of organizing so many projects, you still aren’t sure you’re doing what God called you to do? How am I ever to know that God is calling me to the priesthood?’ The answer is that we act in the courage of our uncertainties. I am fond of pointing out that the word ‘decide’ comes from the Latin decidere, ‘to cut off.’ You face choices — whether to be a priest, whether to go to this school or that, whether to marry a certain person, whether to pursue this line of work or another — and then you decide. And, in deciding, you have cut off the alternatives and pray you have decided rightly. But you do not know for sure. Or else you are trapped in the tangled web of indecision.
–Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, “As Long As They Spell Our Names Right”, First Things, November 2007 [emphasis added]

Being in this season of waiting feels unnatural. But I guess that is why we need to build community. Only thus can we learn to cultivate difficult virtues and mature our practices of steadiness and patience. Our friends illuminate the dark corners of our lives that we would like to keep hidden, and they speak truth and courage into our lives on those days when truthful actions seemingly create nothing but pain. They know what is right when we know nothing but confusion. And together we learn how to shamble after Christ in a world where such virtues seem unnatural. Maybe that’s why I find myself increasingly drawn to the way Christ uses the imagery of cultivation in his parables. The word implies the work-in-progress, the almost-but-not-quite, while affirming the harvest-to-come…

Why, O Lord, is it so hard for me to keep my heart directed toward you? Why does my mind wander off in so many directions, and why does my heart desire the things that lead me astray? Let me sense your presence in the midst of my turmoil. Take my tired body, my confused mind, and my restless soul into your arms and give me rest — quiet, simple rest.
–Henri Nouwen, Show Me the Way: Daily Lenten Readings