In praise of queues

“That wasn’t so bad,” I said. My family and I had just purchased tickets at a small tourist office a few minutes’ walk from the marble-laden castle of Versailles. The queue had been quick; we were speeding ahead of those other tourists buying tickets at the chateau itself. Decked in blaring white sneakers and fanny packs, they were easily spotted. After a brief bag inspection at the crenelated gold gates, we stopped for a second. First, to gape at the fortress of a house gleaming golden under an unimpeded July sun. Then, at the sprawled, looping lines of tourists spread across the massive cobblestone pavement funneling to a tiny doorway. Rick Steves had warned Versailles would be busy, but I was not prepared for the wait ahead.

Four hours. We ate our lunch standing, talked and talked standing, burned slowly in the heat standing. Finally, we pushed our way through into high rooms padded in red silk and weighted with layers of crown molding, ceilings burdened with gods ascending into clouds.

In the end, we preferred Versailles’s park-wide gardens: open to real sky, spaces expansive enough to be alone in, even in the height of tourist season. To enter these gardens, there was hardly a wait at all.

Much of life is lived in lines. Lines pushing grocery carts in the rush-hour glut after work. Lines at the post office holding a heavy cardboard box. Lines for the best Pad Thai in town on a Friday night. Lines to speak to a real person after shouting at a robot. Lines to see muscled arms toss a ball. Lines to cram against other shoulders to hear strums and beats. Lines of sweaty, dripping bodies waiting to slip down a water slide in seconds. Lines for everything humans deem desirable. I don’t like lines, but I’m trying to see the gifts therein, trying to believe gifts are there to be found.

Here is a challenge to myself: don’t waste the line. The busy part of me, the taskmaster obsessed with efficiency, tells me waiting can be put to good use: email correspondence, mental meal planning, marking my way through stacks of my students’ quizzes. During grad school, I wrote essay drafts sitting in planes and airports. One of the modern Bible paraphrases was transcribed on subway commutes.

If the line is long enough and slow enough, especially if there is seating, like at the doctor’s or license branch, I sometimes read. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve made a habit of bringing a book with me almost everywhere. Suddenly, the mauve walls and staid paintings dissolve, and I enter a sphere of infinitely more interest: through the wardrobe to biting firs and the frosty lamppost, jumping over bends in time, pressing axle grease over my lips on the Oregon Trail.

At Versailles, we redeemed the hours in conversation, in enjoying each other’s presence as much as we could. At least we were waiting together, and together we would share a memory of the longest line we had ever known.

Despite my best efforts, somehow I find it easy to languish in lines. Somehow, it feels right to be miserable and bored. It’s easy to ignore the efficient taskmaster and scroll through the endless, mostly meaningless minutiae on my phone. It’s easy to pour out my precious few earthly minutes in staring and wishing I was not here.

But maybe the staring is not wasted. Maybe it’s okay to ignore the taskmaster. Maybe the line invites me into a moment of space and quietude. Here is a forced pause in the whirl of to-do lists I am knotted and bound in, tripped and whipped by. Here, stop. My heartrate slows.

At the dentist’s office, my phone is poised for action, my thumbs at attention. All day I’ve been swatting at tasks like fired tennis balls. My mind has inhabited six different duties each minute: copying quizzes, coordinating remedial work for lagging students, penciling lesson plans, scheduling a last-minute parent teacher conference, and on the list unravels. Then: the sudden pause in the waiting room like brakes jammed to the floorboards of a speeding car. (Funny how we rush to make appointments on time, only to wait.)

I know I can check my email (again) in an attempt to feel productive. But somehow I feel there is meaning waiting, meaning pulsing beneath the surface of this moment, if I will just be still. I stuff my phone into my purse at my feet, and try to practice presence: whiffs of metallic prongs and rubber gloves, the scandal muttering through the TV, the way an elderly man has looped his wife’s handbag over his knee, the empty chair next to him holding a book about hummingbirds.

But observation for observation’s sake falls flat. Emptiness for its own sake empties. Solitude needs a center. As Merton says, “Recollection without faith confines the spirit in a prison without light or air.” In the dentist’s office, I try to hear what is underneath all that I sense. I try to hear the Spirit. He whispers.

Painful this process of unlearning efficiency, allowing not only spaces and gaps, but Godward ones. Instead of checking my text messages as I wait at the dinner table for my husband to wash his hands, I am learning to permit a few seconds of unplanned silence: to listen, to be aware. Instead of occupying my mind with battalions of distraction, I am learning to be curious about what God will say, in silence. Instead of planning the weekend out in Monday morning traffic, I am learning prayer. Spaces of waiting can open into little cells of contemplation, solitude, silence.

As much as a door to the interior, perhaps the queue also opens outwards: an invitation to communal presence.

I am in line at Walmart after a long day of teaching (But what day of teaching is ever not long?). Mechanical blips mark the seconds. I notice. I notice the candy-colored stacks of gum. I notice the magazine headlines with yet another revolutionary way to lose ten pounds. I notice the cashier’s nametag. Her name is French. As a French teacher living in the middle of Indiana, even the remotest connection to French excites me. “Parlez-vous français?” I ask.

The woman looks up, and in her eyes it’s as if a curtain is thrust back for a second. “Oui, je parle français!” She tells me she is from Haiti. She tells me of the hurricanes. She expands multidimensional from the flat, blue Walmart vest into a human being shaped by story. And perhaps I become to her more than another flat face in a ceaseless battery of consuming faces. These few seconds on earth we share, suddenly, strangely.

But what about the long-term waiting, that gut-crushing, crossbeam-splinters-in-your-back kind? Lines at Walmart are a spoonful of cream compared to the labor of waiting for an acceptance letter, a callback, a kidney transplant, a homecoming, or, in my case, the conception of a child. My husband and I have been trying for nearly a year, and each passing month falls like a stone on the heart.

The Sunday-morning faithful say God’s timing is best. However cliché it sounds, in my own life this has proven true, even if I have had to adjust my meaning of “best,” entrust its definition to God. God calls me to remember the ebenezers, those tangible reminders in stone and ash telling stories of His goodness. Reading the Old Testament, I’ve noticed that when God speaks to the Israelites, He often begins by stating what He has done for them in the past: “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” It’s when the Israelites forget this that they stray.

I know a closed door can be a grace. Like all the boys I had crushes on who never noticed me—until my husband. Like the house we knew was the one—but wasn’t, because another was better.

Or like when I was just about to graduate from university and didn’t have a job yet. I had applied for a position in a French government program teaching English to French students. I knew it was meant for me. But a formulaic email stated I’d been put on the waitlist, and ultimately I was not chosen.

Plan B: find a job. I sent out letters to all of the publishing houses I could find in my hometown. I brandished a straight-A transcript, a double-major in English and French, a stack of awards, completed internships with respected local organizations. No one replied.

And then weeks before graduation: one of my professors emailed me an opportunity to teach French at an international school in Ethiopia. “Just pray about it,” she wrote. I did. In a baffling flash of six weeks, I accepted the position, raised enough funds to go (or rather, God miraculously provided despite my reluctant efforts), and found myself on a plane to Addis Ababa.

I entered Ethiopia emptied of the world I knew and left four years later, gift-laden: the hundred-fold family Jesus promises, lifelong friends, my husband. We have nailed an Ethiopian cross in our dining room. It is silver.

I wonder what the distinction is between active waiting on God’s timing and passive complacency? What if waiting on God’s timing means carrying out the timing, like a midwife? And how do I know what God’s timing even is? I may never know the answers to these questions, but I do know that the entrance to Ethiopia was something that I could not have had the power of seeking, that it arrived as a simple, unexpected grace. What I truly wanted, or perhaps needed (Is there a difference between the two?), was something that had not even entered my consciousness. It wasn’t Versailles’s opulent corridors that satisfied, but the gardens.

The waiting for that divine timing can be excruciating. The dark distance between the request and the request granted gapes painful—but sometimes exhilarating, too. At a fairylight-lit speak-easy, my friend Laura and I sip cocktails. In her fishnet tights and sparkly black shoes, she gushes over her beau. She cannot wait to be married. “If he would bend on one knee right here, right now,” she said. “I would say yes.” Even as she mouths her longing into words, her face lights up against the dim.

My husband and I have been married for almost five years, and while I would trade nothing for the anchoring depth of our love now, while I would never want to return to the tantalizing, unsteady jitters of our courtship, I sometimes recall that premarital pursuit with a kind of wistfulness. The unknown was dangerous and exciting in a way, star-lit as it was. We had not seen each other’s bodies. We had not shared a bed, or a kitchen. We had not yet toed the aisle in tux and dress. So much lay ahead to look forward to. As yet unformed by reality, those folded fairylands took on fantastical colors. What was not yet could be anything, could be as wide as my imagination and my dreams.

And there was something sweet about the yearning. I remember those terrible moments after dates in cheap cafés, saying goodbye to my fiancé at that street in his neighborhood in the dark. I remember kissing him, and the longing to take him home with me was a palpable thing, a heavy presence in my gut, something not yet born but itching to be. Even in that keen craving, the craving itself, the pure absinthe of desire itself, showed me I was alive and that I loved and that good things lay ahead.

This season of waiting for a child unsettles. As each cycle begins, a fresh hope begins. And as each cycle ends, that hope dies. But in this season of yearning together, waiting together, we root together. That there is something ahead that we desire enlivens our spirits, even as at times that same desire seems to enfeeble them. Expectation, hopeful expectation, is a gift.

“This time is precious,” I say to Laura, shadowed bright against the winter dark. “Enjoy the mystery and excitement of this season. You’ll never get it back.”

Even as I say these words, I know they are meant for me, too.

My grandparents have already had—and sometimes lost—the loves they fell for, the babies they prayed for, the careers they sweated for, the grandbabies (and great-grandbabies) they hinted for. My grandpa lives in a makeshift bedroom walled in hastily-sewn curtains. He awakes alone in bed, shuffles to the bathroom on his walker, balances food to his mouth at the kitchen table. These few cells compose his whole world.

“It’s heck gettin’ old,” our 80-something-year-old neighbor would say before he died in a morphine haze on a cot in a dark bedroom. He was a farmer who would force himself up on his John Deere, or on his walker to water the roses. He knew if he stopped, he would stop forever. He had to tend something to stay alive. He had to have something to wait for.

Waiting is part of what keeps us alive.

There is a sense that the longer the wait is, the more valuable the object of waiting. At a famous local bakery, I feel I’ve stepped into a rococo painting or Marie Antoinette’s boudoir. Pearls string around wispy chandeliers, servers flit in white ruffled aprons; garlands of artificial pinkish flowers brush ivory crown-molding; tri-layered cakes tower frostily in polished glass domes. To pass the time, my husband and I stare at framed photos of celebrities with cakes. We’ve ordered two slices (champagne raspberry for me, German chocolate for him) and the wait lengthens. “It shouldn’t take this long to cut two slices of cake,” my husband says. I agree.

But then I wonder: maybe it’s all part of the game. Fast-food restaurants pride themselves in brown-bagging warmed-up meat patties in seconds—but neither the servers nor the consumers have any illusions of transacting anything of value. Maybe the extra-long wait for the extra-long slice is intentional: waiting builds anticipation, heightens mouth-watering, fills the expectant cake-eater with visions of a confectionary heaven: shows the worth of the thing sought—even if, in the end, the object does not satisfy.

I know I will always be waiting on something. When I graduated, I wanted a job. When I had a job, I wanted to be married. After getting married, I want children. And the rest of my story is not yet written. I may never hold a child of my own body. But I do see a pattern in my own vaporous life: once one prayer is answered, another will be birthed in its place. My husband and I will always be waiting: for a package in the mail, a visa, a job, a healing, a reconciliation, a next step. I know I will never be satisfied here.

And maybe that’s the point.

All along we dream of gilded castles, when our deepest desire is to return to the Garden.

Or rather, the One who breathed the Garden into being. I recall Saint John of the Cross burning for his Beloved.

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
— ah, the sheer grace! —
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

It is dark, the narrator is alone, hidden, hungering. He has no guide but his desire, but the dark. And the desire—the longing itself—is a grace.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.

Night as guide. Dark as a space of union. Lightlessness as transformative, as a sharpening and shaping unto holiness. I pray to burn, to be enlivened by, this kind of desire, one that snuffs all others. That I would see the object of my waiting in every queue and jam, the object of my waiting being divine. Perhaps my impatience in the waiting roots in mis-prioritized longing. Though we wait a lifetime for the divine consummation, to seek Him now requires no queue at all.