There are times when the soul, like a paralytic by the pool of Bethesda, can do little more than wait for the stirring of the waters. In these moments, when isolation deepens into what feels like abandonment, even prayer can seem to dissolve into silence. One stands motionless before God, without energy, without bearings, without light. And yet, precisely here the psalmist’s cry from the depths becomes our own:
“My soul lies in the dust; by your word revive me.”
“I declared my ways and you answered: teach me your statutes.”
The words are not an escape from desolation but a surrender to it. They reveal the humility of a heart that no longer pretends to understand its path. St. John Chrysostom, in his letters to Olympia, wrote from the pain of exile and sickness, comforted only by the mystery that Providence had not abandoned him but had drawn him into a hidden obedience. He wrote, “Do not be downcast; this storm is not forever. The Lord allows the sea to rage that He may show His power to still it.” His consolation was not the removal of suffering, but the discovery that even in isolation, he remained in communion with the will of God.
Like Chrysostom, the psalmist does not ask for escape but for clarity: “Make me grasp the way of your precepts.” This request is not intellectual but existential. When one can no longer act outwardly, the soul is invited to act inwardly: to “muse on His wonders,” to remember, to yield. The paralysis of body or will becomes the stillness in which God works secretly. What once seemed like abandonment becomes the furnace in which all self-conceived paths are burned away until only one word remains: “Wait.”
Waiting, in the spiritual sense, is not passive. It is the still gaze of love held upon the unseen God. Chrysostom’s letters breathe this kind of faith. In one of his darkest hours he told Olympia, “Even if the whole world be in arms against me, I will not cease to bless God.” He recognized that divine delay is not absence but purification. To wait is to allow one’s own will to be quieted until the heart begins to move again in rhythm with the divine.
When the psalm concludes, it is no longer the cry of a broken soul but the vow of one who has found freedom within obedience:
“I bind myself to do your will, Lord, do not disappoint me.
I will run the way of your commands; you give freedom to my heart.”
This is the paradox of the spiritual life. Outwardly, exile, illness, and stillness appear as loss. Inwardly, they become the narrow door through which the heart is enlarged. The soul that waits in the dust is not forsaken but prepared; not abandoned but being fashioned into a vessel of love.
In the end, when all human strategies and calculations fall silent, God speaks the same word to every faithful heart; “Wait, and I will revive you by My Word.” In that stillness, even in exile, we learn again what Chrysostom knew so deeply: that the freedom of the heart is found not in movement, but in surrender to the will of God who dwells even in our desolation.
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