When you find yourself in a hallway season

Oh, goodness. If that wasn’t just the lesson He’d been teaching, my Sovereign Instructor, for months, years. Doors yet closed. Praising, sacrificial. Wait time, long, and what to do out in the hall?

It’s writing day. In the predawn darkness, I drive in, feeling it. Anxiety, niggling. I need something…

I need Jesus.

Coffee (a holiday blend) steaming in the mug, I find Isaiah 53. For it’s the Advent season, and my thoughts turn toward the One I need.  And find this: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men.”

Oh, my.

I read on. “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him.” Grief’s welling up. Across the centuries, I can feel it–the sorrow of the suffering Christ. Lonely. Rejected. Abandoned. Overlooked. By those around. By others.

By me.

I think of that hallway. And I think of Him, full human, feeling the sting of rejection. The loneliness of it, and the abandonment. In a world that prized beauty, He’d not measured up.

Jesus was lonely. Made in His image, we, how did we not think He had feelings, too? That He, like us, could be hurt? Could feel the pain of betrayal, the slash of hatred?

“Sit with me.” It’s Him, His voice.“It comforts me when you do.”

And like that, I know it. Know the secret. Know what the hallway’s for. Know the perfect gift for the babe of the manger, Him suffering, dying, then rising all glorious.

It’s the gift of sitting–just sitting–with my Friend and Elder Brother. The gift of a heart content, wanting nothing more than…Him.

The hallway, I see now, is a sanctuary. Holy ground. A sacred place, not to be merely endured, but to be embraced. In His presence, giving (and receiving) consolation. Finding peace, rest, joy.

And you, too, perhaps? You will give Him the gift of simply waiting–sitting with Him as you wait for your own doors to open? Ah, let it be.