SHE MEANT WELL. I appreciate that. And others seemed to benefit from what she did. But I couldn’t get into the flow of what she was wanting to help us do.

It was the first of many meetings scheduled before the beginning of the academic year, an opportunity for all the faculty and staff to come together in one virtual space to reconnect with our shared mission and hear of the latest developments. The person who opened the meeting wanted to begin by recognizing how difficult the events of recent weeks and months had been, with the country and the world being continually rocked by political turmoil. So she led us through a meditative exercise on hope, helping us to imagine and then embrace the fact that God is still in control, even if everything else seems to be spinning out of control. And judging by the number of words of thanks that were dropped into the chat afterward, many folks found the exercise meaningful and helpful.

I, unfortunately, was not one of them.

To set the stage, she introduced the exercise by alluding to these difficult events without naming them outright. But as soon as she opened that door, a feeling of grief arose within me and my eyes clouded with tears. It’s in my nature to avoid conflict, and sometimes that also means living with a certain amount of denial: Yes, the world is upside-down, but hey, I’ve got work to do. Best get on with it. It’s a way of surviving chaos.

Her invitation to consider the many ways in which the world is broken somehow cracked that protective shell, forcing me to contend with all the challenging emotions inside me: confusion, anger, frustration, sadness, anxiety, fear. I wondered where things would be in a month, in a year, in five years and beyond. I wondered with what kind of a world my beautiful granddaughters would have to contend.

But even with all that, even with that sense of being overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, I didn’t want that grief to go away, not completely, not yet. It felt right. I needed to experience it before moving too quickly into an easier and more comforting sense of hope.

. . .

TOO OFTEN, I think, we as a community of faith have a low tolerance for grief and lament, in a way that’s quite different from the Psalms, the Prophets, and even — surprise! — the New Testament. Regular readers of this blog may have heard me say this before, but one of the best examples of this is in how we often read or preach a text like Romans 8:28:

We know that God works all things together for good for the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose. (Rom 8:28, CEB)

I’ve heard this text used repeatedly when someone laments some personal difficulty. And to be clear, I don’t think the text itself is inappropriate in that context — but it matters how it’s used. If a person has already done a good and compassionate job of listening to another’s sorrows, it can be helpful to offer such biblical encouragement.

But I worry that we’re tempted to rush to quickly to encouragement, before we’ve made holy space to hear the dis-couragement, literally, the loss of heart. The text is trotted out to ease one’s own anxiety about the other person’s suffering, to make it better for them so that it will be better for us. And when we do that, the other person may quickly learn their lesson: It’s not safe to talk about the hard stuff here.

And how often, when we recite Romans 8:28 to someone, do we remember or recite the context? Listen to Paul’s lead-in:

We know that the whole creation is groaning together and suffering labor pains up until now. And it’s not only the creation. We ourselves who have the Spirit as the first crop of the harvest also groan inside as we wait to be adopted and for our bodies to be set free. We were saved in hope. If we see what we hope for, that isn’t hope. Who hopes for what they already see? But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience. In the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans. (vss. 22-26)

The creation groans like a woman in labor. We groan right along with it. And even the Holy Spirit groans to the Father on our behalf when we’re too weak to find the words to pray.

That’s a lot of groaning.

And groaning is the context of our hope.

Yes, a woman in labor is looking forward to the birth of new life. Yes, she knows that after the groaning comes joy. But no one with an ounce of sense would say to her, “You know, you’re going to be saying hello to a beautiful new baby in a few minutes, so could you please get it together and stop groaning?”

. . .

PAUL SAYS THAT “if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience.” Patience? Really, Paul? I’m not sure I’d say that to a woman in labor either. What could he mean?

The problem is with our images of what it means to be patient; to us, it can connote being calm and unperturbed. But in context, I don’t think that’s Paul’s meaning. A better translation might be “perseverance” or “endurance” — the word, at root, pictures being able to withstand pressure. Hope must necessarily wait, but that waiting can be restless and painful.

We know God’s character. We remember what he has already done. And we know what ultimately he will do when all of this broken creation is finally restored to wholeness. Our hope is grounded in all of these. And yet we groan, we lament, we utter what prayers we can.

There is such a thing as holy impatience, the longing to see God make things right. Paul seems to think that lament and groaning are normal states of being for the community of faith. And ironically, if we can’t make space for that kind of holy impatience as a community, we will probably be inappropriately impatient with each other, unable to tolerate each other’s anxiety-provoking behavior because we want everyone to have the full “victory” now.

The victory is coming. We see signs and portents of it now, and that further encourages our hope, if we have the eyes to see. But in the meantime, as we wait, we groan with a holy impatience. Can we groan together in a way that encourages true hope?

Come, Lord Jesus.