Still Waters in the Waiting

Still Waters in the Waiting

Jonathan had learned to read maps long before he could read silences. For years his hands had pressed hot-food packs, vaccines or On-the-go Ration bags into waiting arms in various refugee camps and IDP clusters, his boots had traced the dust of displacement camps along the Myanmar and Syrian border, his voice had carried some familiar names- Akbar, Sultana Beg, Noyeem, Idris Bin and a hundred others into reports that would one day reach his organization’s headquarters. He had been useful. Purposefully, exhaustingly, gratefully useful.

Then the world shifted. Donor priorities changed like trade winds, and the organization that had defined his identity folded its tents. He waited, was certain, at first, that the phone would ring. It did not. Weeks softened into months and months into years. He and Sara prayed, deliberated, and eventually concluded that perhaps purpose lay in a different hemisphere. They packed up their lives and moved the family along with the suitcases to a small island nation in the Pacific, where the sea was impossibly blue and the pace was unhurried. Their lads Joan and Caleb were already in different countries completing university.

But the stillness that looked like rest from the outside felt, from the inside, like stagnation. Jonathan walked the suburbs in the mornings, watching the bougainvillea spill over fences, marveling genuinely marveling at the Creator's extravagance with colour and coastline. He would whisper prayers of gratitude for what he saw. Yet beneath the gratitude ran an undercurrent he could not silence: I was made for more than this. When will it begin again?

One Thursday he found himself in the local library, simply because it was cool and quiet and he had nowhere particular to be -a sentence that still made him wince. He pulled a worn volume from the shelf without much intention and settled into a corner chair with his water bottle beside him. He carried the bottle where ever he went. After a while, his eyes stopped on a passage mid-page, and something in him went still in a different way, not the hollow stillness of waiting, but the attentive stillness of being addressed:

Life doesn't pause just because you're struggling or feeling overwhelmed. It moves on, relentlessly, without waiting for you to feel ready or to be at your best. Sometimes the weight of our burdens feels too much to carry, and it's easy to want to give up. Your strength is not measured by the days when everything is easy, but by how you continue to show up even when the road is tough. Sometimes the most productive thing in busy schedules of your day is to pause and stay away from what you are doing. Take a moment or a few as often as you need. Pause and breathe.

He read it twice. Then a third time, slowly. He thought of the Psalms, those ancient field journals of a man who had also known the wide terrain between calling and fulfilment. A verse surfaced from somewhere deep in his memory, from the twenty-third Psalm, a passage he had first memorized as a boy and had recited since in more languages than he could now count:

"He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul." -Psalm 23:2–3a (NIV)

He makes me lie down. And not he waits patiently while I lie down, or he suggests that I rest when convenient. He makes me. Jonathan turned the grammar over slowly. The Good Shepherd does not apologies for the meadow. The green pasture is not a detour from the journey, but it is part of the itinerary. The quiet water is not an absence of purpose; it is the place where the soul is restored for what comes next. He had been treating this season as a malfunction. Perhaps it was a feature.

He sat with that thought until the afternoon light moved across the library floor. And then another verse arrived, one he associated with labor and exertion, but which now settled differently:

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." — Matthew 11:28–29 (NIV)

Rest for your souls. Not rest from your souls-not an unesthetic, not avoidance but rest that goes all the way down, to the part of a person that keeps score of their own worth. Jonathan had been carrying a yoke of his own fashioning: the belief that a man is only as valuable as his last deployment, his last report, his last act of measurable usefulness. Jesus was not offering a holiday from that weight. He was offering an exchange- altogether a different yoke, one fitted and light, shaped around a grace Jonathan had not yet fully believed applied to him.

He closed the book. Outside, a ceiling fan turned slowly above the librarian's desk. A child murmured over a picture book in the next aisle. The island carried on, unhurried.

Jonathan breathed.

It was, he realized, the first full breath he had taken in months.

A Moment to Pause

Is there a season in your life you have been treating as a detour — a gap between the person you were and the person you expect to become again? Consider that the Shepherd who leads beside still waters is not confused about your location. He brought you here. The pause is not the problem. The pause may be the gift.

Sit with Him today. Breathe. Let the quiet waters do their restoring work.