Good That a Man Should Quietly Wait

Nine o'clock this morning was the last time a human being told him anything, and it was four sentences long.

Since then: nothing. Not bad news. Not good news. Staff have walked past him perhaps forty times and every one of them has been perfectly pleasant and none of them has been coming to him.

It is four in the afternoon.

He is not angry with anybody. He has worked out over the years that people who look busy usually are, and that a corridor is a bad place to judge anybody from. But somewhere around lunchtime the silence stopped being neutral and started being a message, and the message it seems to be sending is that nothing is happening, nobody has thought about him, and he is a man sitting in a building where he has been mislaid.

He has considered asking. Twice he has half stood up. Both times he sat down again, because he could not work out what the question would be.

That is your bench. That is your seven hours. And I want to get at that silence, because you have been reading it as a message and it is not one.

Quiet waiting is called good

Lamentations is a book written from inside a catastrophe, by somebody with no information and no reason to expect any. In the middle of it he says something startling.

The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.Lamentations 3:25-26

It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait.

Good. Not tolerable. Not necessary. Not a thing to be endured until something better starts. He calls the quiet waiting itself a good thing, and he does it in the worst book in the Bible, which is the only reason it carries any weight at all.

You are doing something good on that bench. Not passing time until the real thing happens. The written word takes the exact activity you have been doing since nine and calls it good, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who has been told nothing all day.

Now let me be straight about the silence, because you have been decoding it and it does not carry a code.

Silence in a building like that means one thing reliably: nobody has come to speak to you. It does not mean nothing is happening. It does not mean nobody has thought about him. It does not mean you have been mislaid. Those are all readings, and you have been generating them for seven hours because a mind with no information will always manufacture some.

You are not receiving a message. The written word does not treat God's quiet as His absence, and it does not treat an absence of news as news. The Holy Spirit has been on that bench since nine, through every one of the forty times somebody walked past.

And ask, if you want to. Go and ask. You are allowed, and the question does not have to be well formed: is there anything you can tell me is a whole and reasonable sentence, and nobody there will think worse of you for it.

You are free to ask and free not to. The written word makes the waiting good without making it passive or making it required. The Holy Spirit is not scoring how patiently you sit.