What It Means That They Have Not Rung

They said someone would be in touch. That was eleven days ago.

You have read, at various points since, that no news is good news, which you do not believe, and that clinics prioritize urgent results, which you do believe and which has made everything worse, because it means silence could mean one thing and it could mean the opposite.

You have looked for how long results usually take. You have found four different answers and none of them was from your hospital.

You have read a thread where somebody said the bad ones come faster. You have read another where somebody said the bad ones come slower because they get reviewed. Both of those cannot be true and you have believed each of them for about an hour.

It is half past midnight and you are on the fourth page of something that is not about you.

And here is the thing that is actually the case, and it is oddly freeing once it is said plainly.

The silence contains no information. Not a small amount. None.

A letter has not been typed, or a clinic is short-staffed, or somebody is on leave, or a system moved it into a queue, or it is entirely routine and going out on Thursday. You cannot tell any of that from here, and neither can anybody who has ever posted on any thread anywhere.

You have been translating a blank.

What this page will not do

I am not going to interpret the delay. Nobody outside that building can, and the ones who offer to are describing their own hospital, or their own fear.

I am going to say the useful part clearly. Ring them. Tomorrow, at nine, and say the plain sentence: I had a test on such a date, I was told someone would be in touch, and I have not heard. Ask whether the result is back and whether it has been reviewed.

That is not chasing and it is not making a fuss. Results do occasionally sit, systems do occasionally fail, and the person who rings is not being difficult, they are closing a loop that somebody in that building would want closed.

If you feel worse, or something changes, ring sooner and say so.

You are not being unspiritual by making the call. Scripture says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, James 1:5, and the asking is commended rather than tolerated, and the Holy Spirit is with somebody standing at a window at half past midnight in the eleventh day of not knowing.

The verse is about a particular kind of waiting

There is a passage in Psalm 130 that is one of the best descriptions of your exact night in the whole book.

I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:5-6

Look at the image he chooses. They that watch for the morning.

That is a night watchman, or a soldier on a wall, or anybody who has been awake all night and is waiting for light. It is a very specific kind of waiting: you cannot do anything to hurry it, you cannot tell exactly how long is left, and the whole of the waiting happens in the dark.

And notice he says it twice. More than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. He repeats himself, which is what people do when they are describing something they have actually done rather than a poetic idea.

Here is what matters for you. The morning is not in doubt. The watchman is not waiting to find out whether the sun will come up; he is waiting for a thing that is certainly coming and whose timing he cannot influence.

That is what waiting on God is described as. Not uncertainty about whether. Uncertainty about when, held in the dark, by somebody who cannot make it faster.

You are not waiting on something uncertain. Scripture says my soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning, Psalm 130:6, and the image chosen is a wait whose ending is not in question, and the Holy Spirit is with somebody in the dark part of it at half past midnight.

Silence is not a message

Here is the thing to take to bed, and it will do more than the last four hours have.

You have been treating an absence as a communication. That is a very human thing to do and everybody does it: an unanswered message, a phone that does not ring, a letter that does not come. The mind cannot tolerate a blank and so it fills it, and it almost always fills it with the worst available content, because the worst content feels like preparation. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 130:5-6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

But a blank is not a coded message. There is nothing to decode. The eleven days contain no more information than one day would have.

And notice what the threads have done. They have not given you information; they have given you two contradictory rules, and you have believed each one for an hour, which means the reading has actively made you less clear than you were at eight o'clock.

You are not required to interpret a blank. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, Deuteronomy 29:29, and there is a whole category of things not currently available to you, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding a meaning that a better thread would have supplied.

What the eleven days have taken

Let me name the cost, because you have been treating it as free. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 130:5-6, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Eleven days of this is eleven evenings. It is also eleven mornings that started tired, and however many conversations you were half in, and a book you have not read, and whatever your children have been saying to the back of your head while you were somewhere else. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 130:5-6, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

The result is going to be whatever it is going to be. The searching has not moved it one hour closer and has not changed one letter of it.

So the only thing genuinely at stake in the next eleven days is those days themselves, and they are the one thing you can still keep.

You are not obliged to spend the wait as well as endure it. Scripture says this is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it, Psalm 118:24, and it is said about a day rather than about a resolved situation, and the Holy Spirit is at work in an ordinary Tuesday that is being lived inside a wait.