Waiting in the Middle of an Unfinished Story

I grew up in a remodeled ranch-style house on acres of southcentral Kansas wheat with a picturesque barn and animals living freely. Between school districts and between small towns, we were dozens of miles from the social hub of school. It wasn’t a convenient place to be a teenager, but it was a glorious place to be a kid.

Except in March.

March was just gray and cold, and uneventful. The sun was already setting as the school bus got us back home in the late afternoon. We weren’t sowing wheat, we weren’t cutting it. We were maintaining, and waiting, and praying for a harvest a full season away.

Now, as a city-dwelling adult, gazing up at the mid-March sky, I feel the same in-betweenness: just past winter, not quite spring. 

Why is this foggy space so difficult to live through?

THE IN-BETWEEN 

It feels like an empty, unnamed void. It’s not where I want to be. And I’ve been here before. This familiar space has a name, and turns out, it has a purpose. 

Liminal space is the space between two points of existence—like hanging in limbo between winter and spring. We leave the known and anticipate the next, but somehow find ourselves not quite there yet. Stuck in between two defined places, brought on by change. 

Often we are familiar with the situation we are leaving and can envision where we will end up, but find ourselves in a place of waiting. After the planting, and before the reaping: longing for the nursery to be filled, or the pain to subside; watching the moving van arrive or finding the pink slip in our hands. After God closes one door, and before He opens another, we’re stuck in the hellish hallway. 

But God’s perfect design is that the old is often not immediately followed by the new. There’s a reason liminal space is a place of not knowing: It is where faith first lives. 

There’s a reason liminal space is a place of not knowing: 
It is where faith first lives. 

Lori ann Wood

PREPARING FOR GROWTH

Each fall on the farm, we’d help Mom dig up her canna bulbs. We wrapped each one in newspaper and placed them in cardboard trays from the cases of canned goods she’d purchased on sale at IGA. It never made sense to me why those bulbs had to lay in our dark basement all winter.

Like those bulbs, we can’t jump directly to the blooming stage. God prepares us in our liminal season—the place of quiet growth and protection.

Following the death of her young husband, Ruth was forced to navigate an in-between time. She chose to leave her known home of Moab and move with her also recently widowed mother-in-law Naomi to unknown Bethlehem. She would eventually marry a good man there and have a second chance at a family, but first, she had to experience a liminal space. 

From my journal:

I have been living most of the last eight years in liminal space, imperfectly. Test result to test result, anxiously waiting to learn if my chronic, progressive disease is getting worse. Despite my doubts throughout those months, my relationship with Jesus has become established. Much as I didn’t want to be in this place.

Just as with the bulb’s liminal season and my own impatient life, God was preparing Ruth for maturity in hers, granting her—as He does for all His children—space to anticipate our Redeemer. Even now, waiting in suffering prepares God’s people.

MATURITY THROUGH TRUST 

The slowed, hazy, in-between is where we get to know God better and trust Him more. Like taking time to search for, then gaze upon, our true love’s face, we realize He is the One we’ve been looking for all our lives. 

And in the limbos of life, we fortify this relationship by acts of trust. 

For Ruth and for us, it is doing the next right thing. Stepping out into the abyss, intentionally moving closer to Him. It is making a stride in His direction, even when it feels difficult or painful or futile. Trust is wrapping a dormant bulb, walking into the dark stairwell, praying for a broken marriage, showing up for the counseling session, forgiving a difficult person. It’s doing hard things without knowing what the new will be. 

Trust is doing hard things without knowing what the new will be. 

Lori Ann Wood

Like Ruth, trust is taking faithful steps with no promise of a particular outcome.

But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.”

Ruth 1:16–17, NIV

By acting in trust despite her in-between, Ruth felt God’s presence. No matter what transition we are living through, Emmanuel has promised to be right in the middle of it all—God with us, too.

THRESHOLD TO THE NEW

Like the months in darkness Mom’s bulbs experienced, Ruth was both protected and prepared.

Ruth gleaned for many months, gathering leftover grain just to survive. They were surely dark, doubt-filled days. But in doing so, she was noticed by a man named Boaz. And a new life started to unfold for her. 

New life starts in the dark. Whether it’s a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, new life starts in the dark.

Barbara Brown Taylor

In its original Latin, liminal means threshold, the point of entry, the beginning.

That same word, that same space that we can experience as a dark, silent basement can also be a brink. Faith requires that we see liminal space not as a holding cell, but as a threshold with a unique view of what God has planned for us in His story.

My own disease, with its inexact prognosis, has ushered me into a lifelong gray space. But I’m learning to embrace the front row seat I now have to see God at work. I have discovered, through years of struggling with Him, that my part is to live into God’s story, to trust that these middle chapters aren’t wasted, and faithfully anticipate what He will do next.

Our in-between is the space where His unfolding purpose can be born. 

Our in-between is the space where His unfolding purpose
can be born. 

Lori Ann Wood

In Ruth’s liminal space, she had an opportunity to solidify her commitment to Naomi. This is what Boaz noticed and loved about Ruth. And by faithfully leaning into that foggy in-between, Ruth married Boaz and their son was born into the lineage of Jesus. 

Author and theologian Richard Rohr describes such sacred space as: “where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed.”

THE BRIDGE OF HOPE

When we are in liminal space, hovering between the beginning and end of our stories, we need hope—perhaps more than at any other time. It is the one bridge that can span the divide between what we are leaving and where we are going. 

Paul called it “the hope held out in the gospel”  (Colossians 1:23, NIV). That by learning the stories of those who have already lived theirs, we might step out in trust and rest in the hope of His finished work.

Hope is rooted in the past but we can’t get through tomorrow without it.

Hope is rooted in the past but we can’t get through
tomorrow without it.

Lori Ann Wood

The paradox is that while we need hope to survive liminal space, hope requires this in-between vantage point. Hope requires looking both ways—back toward the past and ahead toward the future. Hope requires that we understand and acknowledge God’s working in earlier times. Based on that knowing, hope beckons us to cast our vision on what will be in the next season.

This side of eternity, all believers are living a liminal life—going in trust, growing in faith, grasping His hope.

When we can step out in trust despite the imperfection and uncertainty of the in-between time—without being released, without being complete, without being healed—we have found Paul’s contentment, Ruth’s resolve, Jesus’ obedience. 

Soon we will celebrate the most important detail about Ruth’s family. Her great-great-great-great-grandson overcame death for all of us. But first, a dark, waiting, liminal Saturday—that ultimately became the vantage point for a joy-filled Sunday. The gloomiest winter gave way to the greatest hope. 

Like Ruth, I take hopeful steps into liminal space. I continue to wait for spring, for the coming season.

Maybe you’re waiting, too:

• For the phone call, 
• for the test result, 
• for the prodigal child,
• for the court ruling,
• for completion, and answers.

Our family ended up selling the farm where we were raised. It felt like we left the family legacy incomplete when the papers were signed. But driving by recently, I noticed Mom’s cannas pushing through the colorless pre-Spring landscape. 

(A version of this piece first appeared in The Joyful Life Magazine.)