Waiting and Walking by Gianna Soderstrom

An entire six months ago, I sat on an overstuffed couch next to a fireplace in a local castle (yes, castle) and started to cry as I talked about the dreams I have, deferred by motherhood. Motherhood is big and beautiful and glorious and intense and it’s not incompatible with dreaming, but it often pushes some dreams back a few years or more than a few years, and that is a hard thing. My friend cried with me. She understood how a hope deferred makes the heart sick. We looked at each other from opposite ends of the couch and took turns handing each other tissue from the box on the table, and sniffled awkwardly when we were interrupted by a guided tour. (The downside of having deep conversations in a local castle.) 

I’ve been a mother for five years now, counting months spent preparing a nursery and waiting on a little human to arrive. I’ve spent most of that time fighting for motherhood and: writing, fitness, running a business, homeschooling, travel, and some quiet hours by myself from time to time (probably actually the hardest.) Motherhood requires a lot of ands.

You’re a mother and a cook, a play-date planner, and a chauffeur. You’re a mother and a teacher, and a body-guard for when a crawling baby thinks the stairs are a good idea. You're a playground monitor to make sure your beloved little angel isn’t pushing other kids off the slide, or begging the mom on the next bench for the pretzels she packed for her own kids. Motherhood is big and invasive and it doesn’t invite other big dreams to share its space. 

This morning I found an email in my inbox about the idea of “holy discontent”. An email that looked at the dreams, the good and true and beautiful dreams God himself puts into our minds and hearts, and then we have to wait for the right time. It feels like an unfair thing, these big dreams that exist for a long time before they become real. Longing for what doesn’t exist isn’t always bad, but it often takes a very long time and a lot of longing before it does exist. 

When Moses is about to die, as Israel stands poised on the edge of the land of promise, Moses gathers them together for one last address. He stands up, maybe holding a staff familiar in his palm, and tells them their story one last time. Moses tells them how they came out of Egypt, how they crossed the red sea, how they walked safely through one foreign land after another and drank fresh water out of a rock in the middle of a desert. He tells them how the dream God instilled in them, the dream of self-government under God, of working the earth and enjoying the fruits of their labor, turned to dust in their mouths again because walking through the desert was long and hard. I have no doubt the people of Israel had wanted to be free from Egypt even before God sent Moses back to tell them about Canaan. But God came up with the idea of taking Israel into Canaan and settling them there, and he charted their route through the desert, and he led them every arduous step of the way and he fed them honey-cakes morning after morning until they crossed the Jordan and filled the land and settled down to farming. 

God breathed into Israel the hope of a different life and they fought him every step of the way. They wanted to run ahead, to get into Canaan before they were ready. They wanted to give up and turn around - even slavery must be better than walking through mile after agonizing mile of sand and scrub. They knew the dream but they couldn’t see it. They heard about the dream but the way toward it was long. They wanted the dream, but they didn’t want the lessons in the desert. The lessons of trust and stewardship and knowing the God who would shepherd them into the big beautiful dreamland. Lessons are often hard; desert lessons when you’re hungry and thirsty and you just have to believe that water will come out of that boulder are even harder. 

This morning I scrolled slowly through the tiny print of the email on my phone, and then, after getting up to make toast and peel a banana, and pour some milk for my littles, I sat down again and read the first chapters of Deuteronomy and listened to Moses telling Israel about their hope deferred. And then I thought about that conversation on the overstuffed couch with my friend and the way we cried together over the good things we wanted, the good things God wired us to care about. The good things that will hopefully, one day come but are not here yet. Somehow, it all gave me hope. 

I have time right now to take the tiniest of steps; to write for an hour, maybe two hours a week. It’s not a lot. I don’t see how these minuscule steps will move me toward the goal of publishing books. Israel probably didn’t see how moving one step, one mile, one day forward in the scrubby hills would get them to the currently-occupied land flowing with milk and honey. Moses probably didn’t see what good it was going to do talking with Pharaoh or watching God turn his brother’s staff into a snake. 

I don’t know what all these means for me, dreaming big dreams right now while I’m also potty-training and doing pre-school in our family room and trying to take walks and get dinner ready in the evening. I don’t know whether I should press into these baby steps and fight for them, write harder and longer until it pays off, or be content with my two hours a week and the consistency that it represents, the faithfulness it builds. Will my dreams be born of slow faithfulness, or working the muscles of my daily stamina into exhaustion?

Sometimes it is easier to retreat to the slavery of hard work, of careening towards burnout. To forget that the God who places a dream in my heart will walk me through the desert towards its fruition. Maybe the real question is this; are these the years of crossing the Jordan and taking the land, or the years of walking slow and steady across the sand, eating the manna morning by morning and believing in the hope of milk and honey. 

Perhaps the answer has been growing in me all through the last year. A year of letting go of a business, being diagnosed with fatigue. Of protecting my schedule from being overrun, going to bed on time, and learning to live on less money so I can live with less work-induced exhaustion. A year of teaching and training two tiny people and celebrating their baby steps; the first pee in the potty, the first time he gripped a crayon and wrote his name, the first time they sang the ABCs without my help. The first time he counted to five correctly or zipped up a zipper without help. The first time she put her boots on by herself or he got dressed without arguing. 

Perhaps the waiting is also the walking. Israel wandered for 40 years in the desert and it must have felt hopeless, but every year they were just that much closer to the land they’d been promised.

It might be forty years before I see my name on the spine of a book; forty years of writing one hour at a time, week by week. Maybe it will take forty years of faithfulness before I am ready to find my words on a shelf in the bookstore downtown, or in a friend’s library. So here, at the beginning of the year, may we be faithful. May we walk one step at a time without despair, in faith and faithfulness. May we hope, even when a single hour every week feels impossibly slow. Hour by hour, the promise is approaching.

Gianna is a mountain dweller, but also at heart a Minnesota lakes girl. She is the giver of goldfish crackers and piggy-back rides to the two littles; owner of too many blue striped shirts. Adventure-hearted, but also a connoisseur of cozy, hot-chocolate evenings. Amateur wildflower naturalist, picker of wild raspberries. Writer, dreamer, wife to Grant, mama to two delightful little humans. And more than the sum of her parts; just like you. She writes on Instagram and everywhere else to bring hope out of our ordinary moments.