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In the Hebrew Bible, there are two main verbs that refer to waiting. One is to wait with expectation; the other is to wait in the tension of enduring. It is not passive. It is an active struggle to live in the face of despair. The hope is in the struggle—God is in the hope.
I often think of my grandmother, the ways in which she would conjure up old Hebrew stories as if they were her own. Hagar, who endured unspeakable horrors, who had the audacity to live, was not just a good story. Her body and her struggle was my grandmother's own.
To hope, to believe in the better, to believe in your future, to shout in the Great Fire as your country is body, to stare down lions, to shake the foundations of the Empire, to make meaning in the face of death, to fail, to create, to live and to love, this is the stuff of hope.
It is sometimes giving it up to begin again. It is not an assent to a construct or a phrase that resigns one to nostalgia or myths or lies. It is the audacious belief that one's body, one's story, one's future does not end in this moment, but shall live, rejoice, and be free.
If there is hope to be found and to be had and to be given up on and to be picked back up again, it is in the waiting, to living, the moving, and having our being beyond the ways we fail to wait, its hard to live, a struggle to move, and assaults on our being.
Selah.
Selah.
As a devotional practice for today, it would be good to listen to this lecture by theologian M. Shawn Copeland entitled: Theology and the Weight of the World
