They Died Without Getting It

Her fear is not that it will go badly. Her fear is that it will just stay like this.

She has been praying about one thing for fourteen years. It has not got worse and it has not resolved. It sits.

And what has grown in her, slowly, in the way these things grow, is not doubt about God exactly. It is a very particular dread about herself.

The dread is that she will die in the middle of it.

Not dramatically. Just that the fourteen years will become twenty-nine and then forty-one, and that she will get old and go, and the thing will be exactly where it is now, and that the whole account of her life will read: she waited, and nothing came, and then she died.

And in her mind that would mean it was all a mistake. Not tragic. Worse than tragic. Pointless.

She is forty-seven. She has never said this out loud to a living soul.

So let me ask you, and I am asking it gently.

What would it mean if this never resolved and you were still counted?

The list is full of people who did not get it

Hebrews 11 is the long chapter of names, and everybody quotes it as the roll call of faith, and in the middle of it there is a sentence people read past very fast.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.Hebrews 11:13

Read that again slowly, because it is describing your fear exactly, and then doing something unexpected with it.

They died in the middle. They did not get it. And the chapter keeps them on the list.

Hebrews 11 records people dying without the thing they had waited a whole life for and counts their faith as faith regardless, and the Spirit who moved that writer left the not-receiving in the sentence rather than tidying it away, so dying unfinished has never once been the same as having got it wrong. You are on that list while it is still open.

Now, I am not going to hurry you here, and I am not going to tell you your thing will resolve.

I do not know that. Nobody honest does. Telling you it will is exactly the kind of comfort that costs somebody dearly at year twenty, and I would rather be useful to you than soothing tonight.

What I can tell you is what the text does with the unresolved. It does not treat it as a verdict.

Hebrews 11 places the ones who never received alongside the ones who did, in one list, under one heading, and the Spirit was in that arrangement, which means the account of your life reading she waited has never once been the same document as she was mistaken. You are not writing the second one.

And there is a phrase there I want to put in your hands, because it is beautiful and it is precise.

They saw them and welcomed them from a distance.

Welcomed. From a distance. That is a person waving at something they will not reach, and greeting it anyway, and the writer counts the waving.

Hebrews 11 gives them the verb welcomed while they were still far off from it, and the Spirit chose that word rather than a word about disappointment, so fourteen years of holding something you cannot reach has never been an empty fourteen years. You have been welcoming it from a distance, and the welcoming is what got counted.