When Will It End — Our Bible App

Day 1 of 5: The Burden of Time

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet, no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
-Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)

In between.
Liminal.
Almost but not yet.
Anticipation.
Dread.

I took a first-year seminar in college that focused on liminal spaces, particularly the liminal space of emerging adulthood. We read memoirs and novels considering the space of no longer being a child but somehow not quite yet being an adult. We looked at different cultural practices about this time, and we considered rituals. There, I was taught to think about liminal spaces as the doorway—it is that time when you lean on the jamb, neither in nor out of the room, but maybe easing into the room’s conversation or activity by engaging from the edge.

At the time, I thought this was a stupid topic for a class because it would only serve me for the short period of waiting for full adulthood. Now, however, I know that we spend much of our lives in liminal spaces. Waiting for a full diagnosis or waiting for further testing. Waiting for the last paycheck of a looming layoff. Waiting isn’t even the right word because it implies that we aren’t doing anything.

Liminal space is life lived—but life lived in between. In between flare ups of a chronic condition. In between panic attacks. In between jobs. In between the violence of yesterday and the justice of tomorrow. In between campaigns. In between successes. In between relapses. In between failures. The time when we know what the problem is, but we have not yet reached a full solution. So much of this time is in the mundane, the rote — just keeping moving while in between.

Parts of our practices focus on liminal times — Advent, for example, is a time to wallow in and enjoy the in-between, to cultivate anticipation and ease dread. But, there are many other times in our cultures where we seek to rush to our destination and then miss so much of our life happening along the way. We stir up our own suffering by needing to be at the destination instead of staying present in-between. Cultivating our own ability to be in between offers richness to our experience, but also invites us to be present to both our own experience and others’.

These are the places we meet God. We often focus on the God who burns in a bush, the God who comes down at a baptism, or the God who meets us on the beach after the crucifixion. Rushing to or focusing on these experiences causes us to miss out on the God who sits with us in the anxiety after we find the tomb empty, the God who wakes anew with us each day, the God of the dark and the grey.

God of every day and God beyond time, remind us of your presence with us in our liminal spaces. Ease our discomfort, calm our anxieties and call our hearts to the place where our feet stand.

Abby King-Kaiser

Day 1 of 5: The Burden of Time

Start reading this 5-day devotional in the app. Find it on the Featured shelf.