In-betweeners are caught between a life that was and a life that will be. Anyone who’s loved and lost knows it. It’s that moment when you can feel yourself thinking, “How on earth did I get HERE?” And, “when will this hell be over?”
I get chills every time I think of “The Lovely Bones,” which is as much a story of a girl stuck between this life and heaven as it is about her murder by a deviant psychopath. For me, though, I find this is a masterful metaphor for what being stuck in-between is like. You can see visions of what was and what will be, but neither is our reality.
We grieve the past and can’t wait for the promised future.
Anyone who is stuck in-between feels estranged to most of life. They find they no longer identify with ‘normal people’ because ‘normal people’ no longer identify with them. For those of us in the place, it’s as if life has passed us by.
One of the biggest traps of being in the in-between phase — which can last several years — is we get so adept at being there, we lose hope, because, quite frankly the ‘new normal’ stays lamentable; an enduring reminder of what was lost, of trauma gathered along the way, and what is still yet to be reconciled. We would hardly even admit it to ourselves, let alone to others, but we can get used to life being hopeless.
The exiles to Babylon were in that foreign land for two generations. The apostle Paul, I’m sure, was this kind of person, as we read his wrestle with being here versus departing to be with the Lord in Philippians 1. Jacob as he waited for Rachel. Indeed, there are so many biblical figures who for years were stuck in the in-between.
Over the past sixteen years of my life I’ve had countless salient moments where I felt so far from home as to wonder, “What on earth are you doing with my life, Lord — and why here?”
In being in-between, we feel marooned.
Yet, there is something that we do in the in-between that’s only available in the in-between. Jeremiah told the exiles that God wanted them to settle down in the foreign land. Through settling down and doing what they could do to promote prosperity in the foreign land, they presumably became a blessing to the Babylonians there. Not least were they given release to be at peace in a land and in a situation that must have felt hellish. But as they got busy living as if this was the new normal, they became the people of God in that strange land.
One of the key lessons in being in the in-between is adapting. God is so patient. We take far longer to adapt to our far-from-home environment, because we want it over and done with — “a return to normal, please” — as we struggle to accept there’s no way back, even as we watch life work out swimmingly for others.
Yet, when we adapt to being IN the in-between, we become overcomers.
Rather than bargaining with God about when we’ll be released from exile, God is wanting us to get used to our surrounds, and like the exiles to Babylon, to serve and be a blessing where we’re planted.
If being in the in-between and thriving there cannot kill our hope, nothing can.
Actually, unless we somehow experience a lengthy in-between time, we’re truly not tested enough to need to overcome.
If our lives are to be this way for some time to come, it is wise to settle, to take joy where we can, while we wait for a hope yet to be fulfilled.
Settling means sowing into lives that have come our way for fellowship, being kind with intention, and waking with a purposeful joy that determines, wherever we be, that “this is the day that the Lord has made”; to “let us be glad and rejoice in it.”
Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash
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