Years ago, I was really struggling. Struggling with relationships, struggling with belonging, struggling with my mentality about my life’s direction. I wanted to leave. I wanted to leave badly.
But I didn’t. I stayed.
At this time, Hillsong United’s Zion album released (the one with “Oceans” on it), and their song “Stay and Wait” struck all the chords:
I will stay
Should the world by me fold
Lift up Your name
As the darkness falls
I will wait
And hold fast to Your word
Heart on Your heart
And my eyes on Yours
I’ll never forget those southern California nights. Driving through the dusty Hollywood hills at dusk. Feeling the madness of a world falling apart and a God who told me to stay, wait, hold on, hold fast while He kept writing the story.
Years later, the madness is smashing me all over again amid a bluer shade of dust in these particular hills.
Truthfully, I’m surprised I’m still living here. Of all the scenarios I’ve played out, a vast majority of them have included my leaving. Of wiping this slate clean and starting afresh.
It’s an inexplicable miracle that the one or two scenarios involving my staying have translated into my actual reality.
I’m here.
I’m staying.
I’m waiting.
Because despite the pain and disappointment in staying, I also see the value. Of not always running and leaving.
Running and leaving are vital skills in some ways. Some people can’t acknowledge the realities of unhealthy relationships, a job that kills them, a lover who abuses them. Of making the tough decisions to make metaphorical or even literal relocations.
But staying and waiting are also vital skills to learn. Working through the chaos. Turning over crushed boulders. Unearthing what remains. What still grows.
To boot: I visited a studio apartment in Asheville this morning. A place back centrally in the city rather than 20 minutes removed into the hills where I currently live alone.
It was a gorgeous little basement apartment of a house by the lake, and I met and talked with the post-middle-aged owner. We had a lovely conversation about writing, traveling, and family.
I played it off with her as “oh yeah you know it’d be great to be more local again” when she has no idea the hills that have crashed around me in the last year and how badly I’ve wanted to run as many as three time zones away.
What am I even doing, visiting this woman, asking her about deposits? Am I serious right now?
It astounds me that I’d even consider moving closer to the rubble, let alone take a nice, intimate look at it, perhaps even prolonging this excavation.
But I can’t shake that holy whisper I first heard all those years ago:
Stay and wait.
The twist of that story years ago is that, eventually, stay and wait did lead to run and leave. It led to a cross-continent road trip that saw me leave and changed my life and inexplicably the lives of dozens others I met along the way.
People who later met one another in the aftermath of my trip, befriended one another, and inexplicably changed the course of countless other lives beyond their own.
God uses both, I’ve learned. The staying and the leaving. The running and the waiting.
But which script to follow? Which path to take? Are we listening to His voice in this particular chapter of the story?
I don’t know. I’m in a season of not knowing. Which means I’m doing a lot of listening these days.
But I hear the whispers. I’ve been unintentionally heeding them these last 8 months as I’ve turned over stone after stone.
I will rummage through this rubble until there are no more boulders or pebbles left to turn.
Then, and only then, will I go. Even if I think it kills me.
