Pentecost Sunday was nearly a week ago, but I still feel stuck in that room. Waiting. Asking this question: how did they survive the long, empty days between Jesus leaving and the Comforter coming?

How did they endure being lifted up by the joy of a promise believed only to drop again into the discouragement of yet another not yet?

And why the gap? Why did they have to wait at all?

We do know that the wait moved them to gather together. I imagine the promise was easier to believe when they could see the hope in one another’s faces. When they could pass around their Jesus stories, like a platter of bread and fish. Stories multiplied into hope. And faith.

And I imagine they worshipped. Sang and prayed.

Was this what it was all for? Was their worship the reason?

Did God wait, strain with holding himself back, because he wanted to hear their songs?

“Call to me,” he had once told them. “And I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3).

Call. My husband tells me this word suggests something organized, something formal. Something created. Like a song. Like a poem. Something more than careless words tossed at the sky.

Maybe you don’t sing songs. Maybe you don’t write poems. But maybe you journal. Maybe you sketch. Maybe you take photographs or bake bread for the neighbors. Maybe you orchestrate elaborate finger-painted messes with the three-year-olds at church and maybe, just maybe, that is your call? Your song? Your cry for more of God?

And maybe that is the point of it all. The point of waiting. The point of living. To add our call to the many others until a crescendo of sound and beauty and worship rises to heaven and All is unleashed.

Then, just as it was that Pentecost when God’s church was born, wind and fire reveal the great unknowns.

What have we all been waiting for? To hear the mysteries of God’s glory in a language we can comprehend.

Those unsearchable glories we never even knew to seek.

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