Hanging Out

I don't know what nature is like where you live, but here in Indiana during spider season, you don't just have to be worried about walking into unexpected webs that seem to be hanging from nothing at all. 

No, sometimes, the spiders themselves are also just hanging out. 

It's dangerous, a certain time of the year, to walk under any tree because you can't really see the spider until it hits you right in the face and by then, well, it's simply too late. It's already on you. 

These things, they just hang there. Starting their silk somewhere up in the leaves and just dropping down and chilling about human-height above the sidewalk. I've happened to see a couple in my life before walking into them, and they aren't moving. They're literally just hanging there. Hanging out. Dangling. 

The yellow ones are particularly bad about this. 

But again, in this season, I find myself wanting that kind of faith. The kind of faith that can somehow just come to rest in suspended animation - not at the beginning, not at the end, not even anywhere that seems particularly safe, but just wherever they happen to be. They're comfortable there. Not thinking about, or maybe even understanding, that something might come along and disturb their rest. 

Just resting. 

I'm not so lucky. I think all the time about the things that will come to disturb my rest. I feel very deeply in my soul when I'm stuck in a place that should not be conducive to rest. I understand - oh, I understand - that at any moment, something might come along and disturb my rest if I try to take it in a place that's not very good for resting. 

I would be hanging out in the middle of the air like that, constantly looking all around me, swinging in circles, keeping my tiny little refracted bug eyes open (actually, my bug-eyes ARE open), constantly aware of the threat that comes because this is not a place to rest.

And yet, sometimes, it's exactly the place God has called me to rest. In suspended animation. 

In the in-between. 

In the already-but-not-yet. 

In the not-there-yet.

In the what-is-God-doing-right-now-because-this-can't-possibly-be-it. 

In the when-do-we-get-there. 

In the wondering and the waiting and the hoping and the praying and the not-so-confident assurance that's trying desperately to cling to this fragile little thread of faith that is doing its best to hold me somewhere a little too far off the ground, but also too far from the place I started. 

I want that kind of faith.