Wait in Lounge

The board at the gate has given up saying anything useful. Where the departure time should be there are three words that everybody in the room has now read about forty times, and the three words are wait in lounge.

So they wait. A hundred and something of them, in the rows of hard chairs, with coats across their knees. A toddler is running a very serious lap of the seating. Two lads are asleep with their hoods up. Somebody's phone is playing a video at a volume they think is private.

A man two rows along has an opinion, and he shares it generously. It will be up before teatime, he says, because his brother in law works airside and this happens all the time and this is what always happens next. And for about twenty minutes, a good number of tired people believe him, and there is a small lift in the room, the way there is when somebody with a bit of authority in their voice hands out a number.

The board changes eventually and it is not what he said. Nobody minds. Nobody even remembers. They pick up their bags.

But there is a woman near the window who did not join in with any of it, and she is the one I want you to see. She is flying to her sister's. It is the first time she has been anywhere since the funeral, and she has spent the whole afternoon looking at three words on a board and thinking about a completely different arrival.

You know that lounge. You have been sitting in it for a while now.

Somebody on your feed had a season and a reason, and they were very sure, and part of you still checks. You would not say that out loud to anyone in your life. You know what it looks like. You have watched other people do it and you have thought, gently, that they should probably go outside.

And still, at night, you open it again.

The question underneath the checking

Before anything else is said, let the real question come up out of the floor, because it has been down there a long time and it is not the one it looks like.

The checking is not curiosity about world events. It is not wanting to be first with the news. A person goes back to that video for the same reason a person keeps looking at a board with three unhelpful words on it, and it is the plainest, most human reason there is.

You want to know how much longer you have to be without them.

That is the whole of it. That is what is underneath the charts and the confident men and the little cold hook in your chest when the season is named. It is not appetite for prophecy. It is grief looking for a departure time.

And I am not going to hurry you past that. Somebody is missing. Their chair is a real chair and the house is a real house and the not-knowing is heavy, and nothing in this article is going to be dropped on top of it to make it lighter faster than it goes.

You are held in a grief that God is not asking you to shorten, and you have His company in the middle of it right now. That is not a soft thing I am saying to be kind; Scripture calls Him the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction (2 Corinthians 1:3 to 4), and it is His Spirit who does the comforting rather than the passing of enough weeks. Grief is not impatience. He knows the difference.

They asked Him outright. Look at what He did.

Here is something worth knowing, because it settles more than it looks like it settles.

The people closest to Jesus, standing in front of Him after the resurrection, asked Him the timing question directly. Not sideways. Not in a video. To His face, with everything they had just been through behind them.

He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority."Acts 1:7

He did not tell them. He could have. He did not scold them for asking either, and I want that noticed, because you have been quietly scolding yourself for weeks. He simply told them where the day lives. It lives in the Father's own authority, and it has not been handed to anybody to announce.

You are not missing a piece of information that other believers have been given. The word is explicit that the times sit under the Father's authority and nowhere else, and the same Spirit Jesus promised in the very next breath is the one who keeps a person steady without the number. Nobody airside knows either. There is no departure board.

And notice what He gave them instead of the answer. He gave them His Spirit and He gave them each other and He gave them something to be. That is not a smaller gift than a date. It is the gift a person can actually live in.