Our Shine Your Light newsletter can help you stay aligned in today's changing world. Yes, Please!
Waiting in Trust - A Spiritual Practice
During a time of transition, there is often a period of waiting for the new to arrive - the new within oneself as well as the new outside of the self. During this time, one often experiences the pain of waiting in a state of limitation - a pain that can be perceived as difficult and frustrating. Sometimes, depending on how long one must wait, it can also lead to a sense of hopelessness.
In the presence of pain, we have a choice to make. The waiting may not diminish. It may continue longer than we would like. Yet, the choice is that of waiting with God, or waiting without God.
Waiting without experiencing one's intimate connection with the Divine is intrinsically painful, not only because the ego finds it difficult to delay gratification, but also because the soul or deeper self longs to be set free, and when it finds conditions within or beyond itself that it cannot change, it experiences a state of imprisonment that fetters the soul's expression and constricts the heart.
Within this circumstance, it is not uncommon to feel that God has abandoned oneself, or, that one has lost one's way through making bad choices. Generally, this is not the case. What is likely to be true is that there is no available explanation for why we must wait, and it is up to each soul to either choose to hold the unknowing in alignment with Divine purpose, or to feel it as an aberration - an unjustified, mistaken, unfortunate, occurrence that seems to remove one from physical or spiritual life.
The pain of waiting without God is that of loneliness, of meaninglessness, of wondering what we are doing with our life, whether we are wasting time and should not, instead, be exercising our Will. This option is always before us: What could I be doing instead of waiting? This is the question of the mind and the ego. The deeper question that may only be found within the heart is: What is God asking of me in this moment?
To wait with God is an altogether different thing than waiting alone. It is to trust the meaningfulness in the delayed arrival of what we wish for. It is to trust Divine timing and the strength and commitment of one's own heart to endure. It is to hold the choice to wait as a sacred choice - one that involves surrender of the ego, the Will, and sometimes of what may seem like an easier or more attractive path to follow in order to follow the dictates of one's own soul.
This faithfulness lies at the heart of waiting with God. It is based on the desire to unify one's Will with Divine Will and one's heart with the divine Heart. Thus, though the experience of waiting may be painful to the embodied self which exists within time and suffers the absence of what it waits for, the soul or spiritual self feels glad to be fully aligned with Divine Being and purpose. It feels the richness of this surrender and the joy of doing what the deepest self knows to be right according to an inner standard.
What is needed in addition to trust and patience during a time of waiting is the support of others who are also in process with the goals that they are moving toward but have not yet arrived at. Whoever has a destination that they are aiming toward that they have not yet arrived at is waiting - some with more active movement than others, some with less; some with greater difficulty than others, some more painlessly. Neverleness, each one who masters the time of waiting in trust does so on a foundation of hope, believing that those who seek shall find, and those who wait shall receive what they long for. This is the Divine premise that comforts the soul who waits with God, and in the presence of others who are also somewhere along the path of their individual journey, it enables the embodied self to wait longer, with greater confidence in a hopeful and promising future.
Spiritual Life | All Articles | Personal Reflections | Archives
