Somebody Went In Ahead

She is waiting for something to open and she could not tell you what it looks like when it does.

That is the actual problem, though it took her years to see it that way.

She has been waiting a long time. Waiting to feel ready. Waiting for a sign that it is all right to proceed. Waiting for something in her circumstances to shift enough that the way forward becomes obvious.

And she has built a whole spirituality out of the waiting, and it is not a fake one. She prays. She reads. She listens hard.

But if you asked her, gently, what she is expecting to happen, she would find that she does not know.

There is no test she could apply. There is no moment she has described to herself in advance that would count as the way being open. She has been standing in front of something for eleven years with no criteria whatsoever for when to move.

Which means she cannot pass. Not because it is shut. Because there is nothing that could ever satisfy her that it is not.

So let me ask you.

What are you waiting to have opened?

The word is forerunner

Hebrews uses an image about hope that everybody remembers, and then puts a word at the end of it that almost nobody notices, and the word is the whole thing.

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf.Hebrews 6:19

Forerunner.

In the Greek it is a word used for a scout, a runner sent on ahead of the main body. The whole point of a forerunner is that others are coming behind. You do not send one unless the rest are following.

Hebrews 6 chooses a word that only makes sense if people are coming in after Him, and the Spirit who moved that writer picked it instead of a dozen simpler ones, so the way you are waiting to see opened has never once been closed since He went through it.

Now, sweetheart, plain talk, because eleven years is long enough and I love you too much to be vague.

You have made your waiting into a virtue and it has become a room with no door in it.

Look at what you have actually built. There is no condition you have named that would end the waiting. No sign you have described. No feeling you could recognize. And a wait with no exit condition is not patience, it is a permanent address.

Hebrews 6 says He has entered on our behalf, which is a completed thing done for somebody else's benefit, and the Spirit was in that completion, which means the sign you have been waiting eleven years to be given was given before you started waiting.

And hold on to the other half of the image, because it is holding you while you read this.

An anchor is not what you use when you have arrived. It is what holds you steady while you are still in the water and it is rough.

Hebrews 6 calls that hope firm and secure while the person holding it is still tossing about, and the Spirit put the anchor and the open sanctuary in the same sentence deliberately, so being unsteady has never been evidence that the way is not open.