Dear Friends in Christ,

Sunday is, in theological terms, the weirdest Sunday of the church year.

Yesterday, we celebrated Ascension Day, marking the risen Jesus’s return to heaven. A week from Sunday, we will celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has left the building; the Holy Spirit has not yet arrived.

So now what? Where is God to be found?

The church calendar asks this question. Our lives ask this question, too. Sometimes, our question is one of despair, wondering where God has gone. More often, we ask the question in less acute pain but genuine confusion. God is hidden from us. We don’t get it.

It is a challenge to recognize God in a life without signposts. For every unique burning bush theophany, there are a million more quotidian moments filled with hope, anticipation, waiting, befuddlement, and boredom. We talk about discerning God as if discernment is a sixth sense that we can develop, but often God’s presence is veiled in the present tense. Often, we see God only retrospectively.

If the high points of Ascension and Pentecost are a part of the Christian life, so, too, is this in-between time—what W.H. Auden named as “the time being.” Seeking and wondering are just as much a part of discipleship as finding and fulfillment.

I write these words knowing that some of us are in days of clarity—but that many more of us are in the confusing time being. We are in the middle space where there is no clarity. If you are in transition—if your child is entering a new phase of development, if you sense your professional identity shifting, if your marriage is no longer a relationship you recognize—you are not doing something wrong. This Sunday speaks to your experience.

Where is God to be found? This week is an invitation to trust. I encourage you not to turn away from confusion but instead to seek God from the center of your wondering. Every experience—even the ordinary one of waiting—is an invitation to seek God more deeply, to know God anew.

Yours in Christ,
Anne+