I am aware that I have been quiet here for the last few days. There are two main reasons for this; one being there has not been a massive amount for me to write about, and the other that I have been incredibly, and unusually, tired.

I am finding that the actual practice of being and waiting can be quite tiring.

It seems an odd thing to say. It is certainly an odd thing to experience. A few months ago I was enjoying a role with YFC which could see me leave early in the morning, drive to the other side of the country, speak at a couple of meetings, pop in on another team and arrive home late to repeat the process again the next day, maybe with the difference of using the train rather than the car. While that was tiring, the tiredness I am currently feeling is very different.

This tiredness seems to be a deeper tiredness, and I can’t really explain what I mean by that.

I do know that I am not really physically exerting myself, neither am I putting my brain under great pressure in moving from one activity to another. I am simply sitting and waiting to see what will happen today. Someone asked if I was going out to chat with people and my response was ‘no’, actually I am not. I am going out and waiting to see what God will do in the places I visit. I am asking why this process of waiting is so tiring.

I think it is so tiring because the waiting space is allowing space for ideas to grow and develop.

One thing I am noticing as I wait is that I am starting to consider things more deeply in an imaginative and creative way. When I was a child I did do a fair bit of dreaming when I should have been learning. In my waiting it seems that I an again finding this ability to daydream and imagine what could be. I guess this links to the prophet role I blogged about here a little while ago. In the past I have enjoyed tinkering with this, but time has always been a factor and I know I have had to draw the dreaming to a stop to enable something, a project or a retreat session, to be completed.

It seems now I have the space to think and go deeper.

On my desk I have a three postcards, and one that jumps out at me as I write today and it says Big Ideas need Big Spaces. It was a card I picked up in a pub in London advertising the Deisel Wall 2008 competition. The postcard has been there for a few months and now I am starting to understand the idea the statement is getting at.

The world we live in places extreme demands on us. It’s ironic, in a sense, to realise that the machines we have that were planned to make life easier for us have inadvertantly had the opposite effect. Instead of making life easier, they have in fact increased the expectation we place on ourselves and upon others to respond and perform. This has resulted in us working longer with boundaries of home and work melting into the shape of a laptop and so space to dream and create to diminish.

Seven or eight weeks on of waiting and having space to observe, to pray, to be available and I am finding that only now is my mind just starting to find the ‘big space’ that it needs to be able to start to imagine what is possible. I don’t know where this leading – but I do know it feels pretty weird – but then having space in a packed world is bound to be odd!