Lectio
“It is God’s will that we have three things in our seeking: The first is that we seek earnestly and diligently, without sloth, and, as it may be through His grace, without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow. The second is, that we abide Him steadfastly for His love, without murmuring and striving against Him, to our life’s end: for it shall last but awhile. The third is that we trust in Him mightily of full assured faith. For it is His will that we know that He shall appear suddenly and blissfully to all that love Him.”
— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
Meditatio
Sabbath invites us to be patient. To slow down. To wait for the Lord. To wait with the Lord. It asks us to lay aside our desires, to delay gratification, and to trust that what awaits us with God is far greater than anything we can plan, predict, or secure for ourselves, even if it only awaits us in its fullness in the next life.
Like Abraham and Sarah before them, Simeon and Anna had spent lifetimes waiting — not striving, not demanding, not filling the silence with substitutes — but simply remaining, expectant, until the child was placed in their arms. After the angel spoke to her, Mary’s entire life was one of waiting, for all she knew was that she trusted the Lord, and that his purpose for her would be fulfilled in his time. And when the disciples stood watching Jesus ascend into the clouds and were told to return to Jerusalem and wait — as the Israelites had wandered and waited in the wilderness for forty years before them — they did not know what they were waiting for, or how long the waiting would last, only that the Lord willed them to be patient. Ten days later, the Spirit came. But they could not have known that on the first day, or the third, or the seventh. They simply stayed. Even Jesus himself knew that the work he was doing with his disciples, the miracles he performed, and the teachings he gave them, awaited its fulfillment — that the hour had not yet come, until it did.
Sabbath is God’s gift of patience to us. It is his invitation for us to practice, for an hour each morning, for one day each week, or across an entire lifetime, patience for his will and himself. But never for his love. For in Sabbath, in this practice of patience, we discover that his love was always with us, is always with us, and will always be with us — sustaining us through and into his very love.
And so, as we seek earnestly and diligently, without sloth, and without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow — for Christ’s yoke is easy and his burden is light — we know that the God whom we seek seeks us also. And as we abide patiently, steadfastly in his love without murmuring or striving in the Sabbath rest both gifted and promised to us, we know that the God in whom we abide abides in us also. And as we trust in him mightily of full assured faith, releasing all that we would plan, predict, or secure for ourselves, he who is the lamp to our feet and a light to our path reveals himself to us in that very trust and through our faith, showing us time and time again that his sudden and blissful presence was present all along, presencing itself in and as the very lives which we so often try to claim as our own, but which ultimately belong to the infinite love from whence we came and into which we will return when all of our striving finally ceases for good and all.
Oratio
Lord
by grace
may my murmuring
and striving
cease
as I surrender
to love
as I fall
into love
for love
neither complains
nor desires to be
elsewhere
or other
than exactly
as it is
and with whom
amen
Contemplatio
What if your waiting — however long, however uncertain — is not an obstacle to God’s love, but the very place where it is being most fully given?
Related Scripture
“The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.”
— Lamentations 3:25–26 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Stillness Recollecting Stillness: The Longing Beneath Our Longing, which explores how the stillness we seek in Sabbath and prayer is not something we create but something that preexists us — a ground of divine love always already present beneath the noise of our striving.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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