Certainties

Yes! Our visas have been issued.

Praise the Lord for answered prayers. Praise the Lord for certainty – at least for the next three months – and for plans being caught before they crumble and fall away. We are going to America!

But we wait on for the documents and our passports to be returned to us. We hope, and pray, that we’ll be on a flight by the end of the week, but while the journey itself is a certainty, the timings and logistics are still unknown.

Waiting changes when you know that there is a certain outcome. Body language, internal anxieties and preoccupied thoughts have gradually given way to overwhelming relief as we relax into the knowledge that we are definitely going to America. The last few weeks have felt like a rollercoaster of emotion and frenetic second guessing as plans have almost been torpedoed, but then rescued at the last minute.

Exhausting.

And all the time we’ve been waiting. Waiting without any control and without any certainty as to the outcome. Waiting for the initial visa response, waiting for the next response, waiting to be interviewed, waiting for that ‘issued’ screen. And now we wait and see if we’ll be in the States by the end of the week, or maybe the next.

Amidst the waiting, we’ve been learning to pray and to trust but also to be thankful that the bigger, more important ‘wait’ is underpinned by certain hope. Through trusting the death and resurrection of Jesus, we can praise God with Peter and rejoice in the fact that ‘He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven…’ (1 Peter 1v3-4). So different to our chopping and changing outcome that even now won’t feel entirely secure until we’ve got through immigration on the other side. We know that we have a heavenly future because of Jesus. Nothing I do or say or think can change it. No ‘eternity’ bureaucracy to get in the way, no hoops to jump through, no brownie points needed. Just Jesus.

As we’ve been waiting, I’ve found my desire to go to America has increased. I pray that as we do the bigger ‘wait’, our desire for heaven and Jesus himself would increase. I pray that my desire for that would overshadow any American dreams.

But please let us do this American thing soon!