Expecting Anything At All

She had told everybody. That is the part she goes back to.

Not just her husband. The small group on a Tuesday, twice. The woman at the school gate. Her sister, who then told their mother, who then told her whole street, because that is what her mother does with good news and always has.

It was a transfer. Six years of the wrong hours, a long drive both ways, and then a role coming up two miles from her front door, and everything about it lining up so neatly that she had said the sentence out loud in the kitchen with her hands still wet: this is God.

She got the boxes. Actual cardboard boxes, flat packed, leaning behind the door for eleven weeks, because she wanted to be ready.

It did not come. There was a restructure, and a delay, and then an email at ten to five on a Friday with a paragraph in it that was clearly written by somebody who had never met her.

She was fine. She said she was fine and mostly she was, and she took the boxes to the recycling on a Saturday morning and did not make a thing of it.

What she has never told anybody is what happened afterwards, over about two years, quietly, without a decision being made.

She stopped saying what she hoped for out loud. All of it. Not just jobs. She says "we will see" now, about everything, in a tone she never used to have. She has become extremely careful, and everybody thinks she has become wise.

She has not become wise. She has become someone who cannot afford to want anything.

He did not tell them off for wanting it

There is a moment right at the start of Acts where the disciples ask Jesus a question, and it is the most human question in the book.

They ask if it is now. Is this it, is this the moment, is the thing we have been waiting our whole lives for happening today. They are standing in front of a man who has come back from the dead. Of course they ask.

And here is what He does not do. He does not sigh. He does not tell them they have missed the point again. He does not say their wanting was immature.

It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has placed under His own authority.Acts 1:7

Read that carefully, because there are two things in it and most people only hear the first.

The first is a closed door: the timing is not yours. Not knowable, not calculable, not available. It sits with the Father and it stays there.

The second is what He did not say. He did not say stop expecting. He answered the question about the calendar and left the hope entirely intact, and then in the very next breath He told them what to do with the meantime, which was to receive power and be witnesses, which is not the instruction you give people who should be lowering their expectations.

So the door He shut was the date. He never once shut the wanting.

And that distinction is the whole inheritance of the people who ended up building this tradition. Some of them did set a date, and told everybody, and waited on hillsides, and the day passed. Nobody here is going to be clever about that from a safe distance. Being wrong in public about the thing you love most is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, and a lot of them walked away, and who could blame them.

But some of them stayed. And the thing they built afterwards was not a better calculation. It was a hope they stopped trying to schedule, and a life with rest in it, and a habit of caring about the body they were actually living in.

They came out the other side holding the wanting and having let go of the date. That is the hard won thing, and it is being handed to you now, from people who paid for it.