The Bulbs In October

She said it standing up, in a room with forty people in it, and her voice did not shake.

She said she believed the old hall next door would be theirs by the spring. She said it plainly, without hedging it, the way you say a thing you have thought about at four in the morning for months. There were young people meeting in a corridor. There was a building sitting empty with its windows going green. She had prayed about it more than she had prayed about anything in her life, and when she sat back down her hands were warm and somebody two rows back said amen with real feeling.

Spring came. The hall went to a developer. There is scaffolding on it now.

Nobody was unkind about it. That is almost the hardest part. People were careful with her for about a month, in that way people are careful, and then it stopped being mentioned, and it has now not been mentioned for three years.

She still comes. Every week, and midweek, and she still does the flowers. She did not lose her faith, and she would like that written down somewhere, because she has noticed that everyone seems to assume it is the danger and it never was.

What she lost was softness.

She hears it in herself. Somebody stands up now with something they believe God is going to do and she feels a thing move across her face before she can stop it. Somebody says the words I really feel like and she is already three sentences ahead, arranging her expression. She says well, we'll see now, quite a lot, in a light voice, and it always gets a small laugh, and she hates it.

And on Sunday her sister rang about something ordinary and she was short with her, properly short, for no reason at all, and she put the phone down and stood in the kitchen and said out loud, to nobody: what is happening to me.

That is not the story of a woman who stopped believing. That is the story of a woman who is still here, three years later, doing the flowers, and quietly grieving somebody she used to be.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you are waiting for something. And you have been waiting long enough that you know the exact contours of it, and you have stopped telling people the date you used to think it would be, and you would not say any of this out loud to anyone in your life.

But you have noticed what the waiting is doing to you. You are quicker to a hard opinion than you used to be. You are ironic about things you used to be simple about. You are a bit sharp with the people who love you most, which is a strange and cruel arrangement, and you cannot seem to stop it.

You are not afraid of the waiting. You have got quite good at the waiting. You are afraid of who you are turning into inside it.

James does not tell them to wait harder

There is a letter written to people in a genuinely difficult stretch, and when James comes to the subject of waiting he does something you would not expect from a man with that reputation. He does not scold anybody. He hands them a picture of somebody doing an ordinary job.

Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord comes. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rains.James 5:7

Sit with the farmer for a minute, because everything is in him.

He is not passive. Nobody has ever met a passive farmer. He is up early and out in it and there is always something needing doing. But not one single thing he does that morning makes the rain come. He is not withholding the harvest by having the wrong attitude, and he is not producing it by having the right one. He works, and he waits, and those two are the same activity in him and he does not experience them as a contradiction.

And notice what the picture protects him from, and this is the part that is for you.

A farmer who waited by clenching would be no further on, and he would be a much worse man by August.

The waiting is not the achievement. That is the correction, and it is a gentle one. Nobody is asking you to wait harder, or better, or with more conviction, and nobody here is going to tell you that if you had believed differently three years ago the hall would have been yours. That sentence is not in this article and it is not in that verse, and it is not in the heart of God toward you.

Here is what the picture asks instead, and it is smaller and it is possible: stay tender while the ground is doing nothing.

Because there is one thing James adds that changes the shape of it. The farmer is patient over it until it receives the early and the late rains. Two rains, months apart, on somebody else's schedule. The farmer does not set them and does not know the day, and if you told him the exact date the rain would come he would work no differently the following morning.

You have been treating your waiting as a countdown with a hidden number on it, and every month the number does not appear, something in you toughens up a layer to survive the disappointment. That is not a moral failing. It is what a person does when they are trying to protect themselves and nobody has offered them anything else to do with their hands. James 5:7 says be patient therefore, brethren, and puts the husbandman waiting for the precious fruit beside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who grows longsuffering as fruit in a person during a wait rather than after one.

And one more thing about what happened three years ago, because it has been carried privately ever since.

You said a hopeful thing out loud in front of people, and it did not arrive, and you have been quietly ashamed of your own hope ever since. There have been others before you who stood up in public with a date in their mouths and were wrong, and the honorable ones did not stop being honorable when the day went past. Some of them went home and stayed, and what they built afterwards was steadier and kinder and quieter than what they had before. Being wrong in public about the timing of a good thing is not the same as being a fool, and it is a very long way from being faithless. Romans 5:5 says hope maketh not ashamed because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, and the Spirit is named inside the very verse that lifts the shame off.

Your hope was not the mistake. Your hope was the best thing in that room that night.