a season of waiting

Thank God for the universality of the human condition :) Two quotes from When the Heart Waits...

"When you're waiting you're not doing nothing. You're doing the most important something there is. You're allowing your soul to grow up. If you can't be still and wait, you can't become what God created you to be."

"Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are. People recoil from it because they don't want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and from God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves."

I do feel comforted to remember that even in aloneness I'm not alone. Charlie and I once talked about the fear of facing ourselves, the unknown or the "dark chaos," that sometimes causes us to remain shallow in our times with God and constricts intimacy within our human relationships. I want to be less timid. To gaze at my soul, and yours, with unflinching honesty and the courage God provides.