The Fourth Hour on a Plastic Chair

The chair is joined to the next one, which means when somebody sits down four along you feel it.

He has been here since twenty past ten. There is a window at the end of the corridor and the light coming through it has changed color twice since he sat down, which is how he has been telling the time, because looking at his phone had started to make it worse.

He has read the fire notice. He has read the poster about hand gel. He has counted the ceiling tiles between the door and the window twice, and got a different number the second time, and could not decide whether that bothered him.

There is nothing left to do. That is the specific thing about this kind of waiting: it is not that he has run out of good options, it is that there are no options at all. Whatever is happening is happening behind a door and he is on this side of it, and everything that could be brought, said, arranged or paid for has already been done.

Four hours of being entirely without a job.

That is your corridor. That is your chair. And I want to say something to you about waiting, because there is a psalm that treats it as an activity with an object, and I think you have been doing it without one.

Waiting with an object

There is a line in Psalm 62 where David says something to himself, out loud, in the middle of a bad stretch.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.Psalm 62:5

Look at the grammar, because it is the whole gift. Wait thou only upon God. Waiting upon, which takes an object, the way you wait upon a person rather than waiting for a result.

Almost all the waiting anybody does in a corridor is waiting for: for the door, for a face, for news. That kind of waiting is unbearable by design, because it has nothing to rest on until it ends, so every minute of it is empty until the last one.

David is doing something else. He is waiting on somebody, which is a thing you can be doing right now, in the fourth hour, with nothing having changed.

You are able to wait on God from that chair. Not later, when there is news. Now, at four hours, with the light gone the wrong color at the end of the corridor. The written word makes waiting take a person as its object, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man on a plastic chair rather than a nice distinction about grammar.

Now let me say something honest about the joblessness of it, because that is the part nobody names.

You are a man who does things. Whatever your life is, it runs on you being able to act, and for four hours you have had absolutely nothing to act on. That is not boredom. It is closer to grief, and it is entirely reasonable that it feels unbearable, and nobody should tell you it is a spiritual opportunity.

You are not failing at this. The written word does not scold the waiter; it hands him something to hold. The Holy Spirit is not assessing how well you are sitting there, and He has been in that corridor since twenty past ten.

And I will say plainly what this page will not do. It will not tell you what is behind that door, or predict it, or hint at it. Nobody writing anything knows that, and anybody who pretends to is selling you something.

You have company that does not depend on the outcome. My expectation is from him, says the psalm, and the expectation rests on a person rather than on a result. The Holy Spirit is in the corridor on this side of the door with you, and He would be there whatever the next hour holds.