You Are Not the Only One Groaning | Romans 8:19

There is a specific loneliness to a Sunday that went fine. Nothing broke. The click held. The new person on mic three nailed her part. And you are standing there in the second song with your hands up, and you look out, and half the room has its arms folded, and a thought crosses that you would never say into a microphone. Am I the only one who came here for this. One of the worship leaders in our survey put the whole feeling in seven words. Still jumping when nobody else is engaged.

Paul answers that thought from a direction nobody expects. Romans 8:19. World English Bible. "For the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed."

Eager expectation is apokaradokia. The word is a picture. A head craned forward, neck stretched out, watching the road for someone who has not come around the bend yet. Paul takes that word and hands it to dirt and oceans and weather. Creation is craning its neck. And notice it is not waiting for a better creation. It is waiting for the children of God to be revealed. It is waiting for you.

Chris and I put a coffee meetup on the calendar in the Nashville area a while back. We did not expect much. Nashville is full of touring musicians and studio players. Forty or fifty showed up. Somebody drove in from Kentucky. I remember sitting in that room realizing how badly I had misread it, and thinking about how many of those people had stood somewhere the previous Sunday feeling exactly what you felt. The ache is not rare. It just does not announce itself.

Paul does something pastoral here that I do not want to rush past. He legitimizes the longing. He does not say the ache is a sign something is off with you spiritually. He files your ache in the same category as creation's, which means it is not a defect in the equipment. It is a signal that you were built for something that has not arrived yet.

Who else in the building probably felt on Sunday what I felt on Sunday? Pick one name. Text that person today.