I feel sometimes you have to be with your process.

For me, that may mean getting a cotton facecloth, sitting down on my bed with my bedroom door closed and letting my emotions connect with my heart and grieve the desires in this heart that continue to live unmet, unfulfilled.

To cry and to lament what I want is not what I have.

And to express my sadness in that.

And the reality that right now, what God has given is what I have.

The tension of where hope and here co-exist together. The reality of the good and the tough tracks of life that we all live on at the same time, no matter the season. The inevitability of what it means to live actively in your waiting. And that this spiritual growth producer that waiting and longsuffering become in you continues with you, in every decade.

What is it about waiting that God deems so necessary for us as His children?

Why does it vex my humanity so?

I want things now but I’m guided to live in light of the yet-to-come.

My heart doesn’t always understand. My mind tries to make things logical, practical, strategic. My tears just know the wait has been long and ‘holding pattern’ feels like the answer that I keep getting.

Lord, I’m listening. Help me to hear the way you are speaking to me.

Modern poet Joekenneth Museau says, “People aren’t taking time to deal with their own issues because there’s always a distraction or something to take you away from what’s going on inside.”

I can feel things that need to be expressed in me before the words come. The tears are my indicators. I give them their propers. And respectfully move my logic and thinking to the backseat of myself and allow my emotions to drive me for as long as the good cry is needed, as long as it takes to truly out get it out.

I cry. I pause. I breathe. I cry again. Repeating this cycle, blowing my nose into that facecloth, embracing what the tears are helping me to do: deal with my life and what I’m feeling and what those feelings want to tell me.

Sadness isn’t bad. It’s a feeling just as joy is. I want to make space for my sadness. And to give my tears room to breathe.