The Factories We Can't Stop: A Theology of Waiting
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #2
I’m writing this during the longest week I’ve had in a while.
The needle goes in twelve times.
The urologist warns me beforehand: “You’ll hear a loud click—that’s the spring-loaded device. Most men find the sound worse than the sensation.” He’s right about the click. Wrong about the sensation. Twelve times, tissue extracted from an organ I cannot see, sent to a lab I will never visit, examined by pathologists whose names I’ll never know.
This is my third biopsy in ten months—bone marrow, fat tissue (goodbye, bikini line), and now prostate. Add hundreds of blood tests, X-rays, MRIs, and a PET scan, and you get a medical resume I never wanted.
On Election Day 2024, I learned a new phrase: “my oncologist.” The diagnosis was amyloidosis—a rare, dangerous disease where misfolded proteins infiltrate organs. Most of the pathology work was done locally. Only one specimen made the pilgrimage to Mayo Clinic, where specialized labs spent weeks identifying the specific protein variant. My physicians in Rochester and Buffalo—including specialists at the renowned Roswell Park—determined whether this was hereditary or acquired, whether my heart was compromised, whether treatment could slow the march.
Those weeks of waiting for results taught me a new vocabulary: lambda light chains, AL amyloidosis, cardiac involvement, neurological sequelae. Weeks of not knowing whether I had months or decades.
This prostate biopsy, by comparison, should be faster—about a week for results. Cancer pathology moves quicker than rare protein diseases. And I already have some good news: my Gleason score so far is 3, which suggests slow-growing cells if cancer is present. But I still feel the anxiety. Still check my patient portal obsessively. Still lie awake calculating: if the final pathology confirms cancer, even slow-growing cancer means decisions. Surveillance? Treatment? What comes next?
And here’s where what Calvin called the “factory of idols” kicks into overdrive: I have a recurring dream about a future Gleason score. In the dream, I’m back in the urologist’s office, and he’s delivering news about a follow-up biopsy years from now. Sometimes the Gleason is still 3—vindication, I made the right choices. Sometimes it’s jumped to 7 or 8—catastrophe, I should have acted sooner. The dream factory runs every night, churning out scenarios, rehearsing conversations, creating elaborate false futures to worship or fear. My imagination, that tireless forge, generates idols I bow before: the idol of Control (if I just make the perfect decision...), the idol of Vindication (the numbers will prove I was right...), the idol of Catastrophe (everything will collapse and it will be my fault...).
The biopsy creates knowledge I don’t yet possess about cells that are definitely mine but may have become something else entirely—mutinous, autonomous, indifferent to my preferences about their behavior.
And so again: we wait.
Biopsies and lab tests force me into the only posture I habitually avoid: waiting.
I. Three Factories Running Full Speed
As John Calvin put it, “man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”1 We can’t help it. Even knowing the danger, even wanting to stop, the assembly line keeps running. We create false gods from our own imagination, then bow before our own creations, enslaved to what we made.
But Calvin only named one factory.
The body is a factory of mutations. Every cell division—and your body performs tens of trillions of them daily—offers opportunity for error. Usually, quality control mechanisms catch the mistakes. But sometimes a mutated cell evades detection, reproduces, establishes its own colony. Cancer is just successful plagiarism:2 your DNA copied incorrectly, then copied again, then again, until the forgery becomes its own species of you..
And here’s the devastating irony: the very organs entrusted with generativity also carry great vulnerability. In women, the endometrial lining undergoes constant regeneration—each cycle of shedding and rebuilding offers repeated opportunity for error. No wonder uterine and ovarian cancers are among the common female malignancies. Likewise in men, the prostate—an organ devoted to seminal production and reproductive support—is a site of frequent cancer in aging. The machinery of creation shares intimate overlap with the mechanics of deterioration. The organs designed to create new life are the organs most prone to create death.
The psyche, too, has its factory. John Bradshaw mapped its production line: trauma comes, the original child cannot bear it, so the psyche creates personas—survival strategies that take on lives of their own. Each one began as adaptive response but became autonomous presence, flooding certain situations with scripted reactions I didn’t consciously choose.
Therapists often help trauma survivors personify these inner parts to work compassionately with them. My internal dynamics are vivid enough that I’ve named them—not as melodrama but as method, a way of working with parts of myself that operate by their own logic.
Christopher Robin is my original child, the authentic self buried beneath decades of adaptive survival. Sadness—Inside Out’s blue-hued child who taught Joy that grief serves connection—holds unprocessed pain I’ve spent decades avoiding. Data, Star Trek’s emotion-seeking android, runs my hypervigilant protocols as Rogue Controlling Child: desperately analyzing every social cue, calculating every outcome, attempting to prevent abandonment through sheer competence. Beast embodies my “I’m done!” energy—protective fury that pushes people away before they can leave first. And Gollum represents my Shame-Saturated Child, that split-personality creature clinging to “my precious” addictions, who betrays connection for comfort-seeking isolation.
Together they form an internal family system I’m learning to parent, with Captain—my integrated adult self—attempting to coordinate these disparate parts toward healing, including recovering Christopher Robin from beneath the rubble of these protective adaptations. These inner children are me—born of my history, my neurons, my experience—but also not me, operating by their own logic, flooding situations with their particular brand of terror or rage or shame, impervious to my adult reasoning about how “we’re actually safe now.”
While the details of my story are my own, the underlying dynamics are hardly unique. The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences study found that nearly two-thirds of Americans report at least one significant childhood stressor. The struggle to love and be loved while carrying wounds of shame and fear is an exceedingly common feature of contemporary life—whether or not we use therapeutic language to describe it.
Three factories. Three domains where we create threats to ourselves from our own substance:
Theological Domain
What We Create: Idols — products of imagination
How It Threatens: We worship our creations, become enslaved to them
Biological Domain
What We Create: Cancer — our DNA mutated
How It Threatens: Ignores boundaries, metastasizes, smothers healthy tissue
Psychological Domain
What We Create: Personas — trauma-born adaptations
How It Threatens: Autonomous patterns that flood us, breach situational boundaries
All three produce fruits that share a terrible commonality: they’re me but not me. My cells, but behaving like invaders. My mind’s products, but turned into masters. My psyche’s creations, but now autonomous presences. I made them, but cannot unmake them. They’re part of me, but threaten to overwhelm me.
And in each domain, the same brutal truth: being made in the image of a generative God means we cannot stop generating. The downside of imago Dei is that the factories never close.
Paul knew this division intimately. “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Romans 7:19-20). The apostle wasn’t describing moral failure. He was naming the experience of invasion—an alien power working within, autonomous yet somehow still me. My Data and Beast and Gollum are the psychological topology of what Paul described theologically: the self divided against itself, producing threats from its own substance.3
If these factories run in me, they run in us—in every body, every community, every body politic that shares this strange blessing and curse of ceaseless generativity.
Your cells keep dividing. Your mind keeps creating. Your psyche keeps adapting. The factories run 24/7, production lines humming beneath consciousness. You can’t shame your prostate into not mutating. You can’t repress cell division through willpower. You can’t dominate personas into disappearing through self-awareness.
Which means dominative theology cannot work. It promises the peace we’ve earned, the peace we merit through sufficient control. But the factories won’t stop. For all its shame-based management strategies, all its techniques of self-negation—the question becomes not “how do we shut them down?” but “how do we live with their ceaseless production?”
Lying on the exam table, hearing those twelve clicks, I understood something viscerally: the body cannot be dominated into submission. It can only be lived with.
II. Confession: The Man in a Hurry
During my middler year evaluation at Duke Divinity School, Sam Wells told me, with his characteristic English gentleness that somehow makes hard truths easier to bear: “Craig, you’re a man in a hurry.”
He wasn’t wrong. My mother knew it long before he did—for my sixteenth birthday, she gave me a stone etched with the words: “The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get.”
But until recently, I thought it was just personality. A quirk. Type-A temperament. The kind of thing that shows up on Myers-Briggs as a feature, not a bug. I’m efficient! I get things done! I don’t waste time!
Except it’s not just personality. It’s theological deficit.
My therapist helped me see what I’d been performing for decades without recognizing it: the Rescuer role in the Karpman Drama Triangle. Mr. Fixit. The one who solves everyone’s problems, not because it serves them but because it secures my sense of worth. If I’m helping, I’m valuable. If I’m valuable, I won’t be abandoned. The terror beneath the helpfulness is attachment wound: the fear that if I stop performing, people will leave.
John Bradshaw would recognize the pattern instantly: toxic shame creates a false self whose entire purpose is preventing exposure of the true self we’ve learned to hate. The Rescuer is my false self’s favorite costume. And what drives the Rescuer? Impatience. Frantic movement. The compulsion to fix things now because sitting with someone in their pain—which is what they actually need—feels unbearable. It feels like not doing enough. It feels like abandonment in reverse: me abandoning them by not swooping in to save them.
But here’s what I’m learning, lying in medical gowns, waiting for pathology reports: impatience renders love anemic.
John Bowlin saw this with theological precision. In Tolerance Among the Virtues, he maps how resentment—anger that cannot act—calcifies into bitterness, nursing the wound, demanding vindication that never comes. It’s anger with nowhere to go, so it goes inward, poisoning everything.
But impatience is resentment’s close cousin. Not anger that cannot act, but fear that cannot wait. The terror that if I don’t do something right now, disaster will strike. Someone will suffer. Someone will leave. Something catastrophic will happen on my watch and it will be my fault for not moving fast enough.
Impatience is the tempo of terror.
And here’s what the pathology labs taught me: when you’re impatient, you cannot love well.
Real charity—the kind Bowlin describes—requires patience as its precondition. Not patience as passive waiting, but patience as active presence. Patience as the willingness to stay with someone in their suffering without immediately trying to eliminate the suffering. Patience as the discipline of time that allows charity to take its proper form.
Which means I’ve been offering people something other than love. Something that looked like love, felt like helpfulness, scored points for industriousness. But it wasn’t companionship. It was management. It was control dressed up as care.
Biopsies and lab tests have become my unlikely curriculum in the one virtue I most lack. They force me into the only posture I habitually avoid: waiting. Not an hour in the tunnel. Not a day until results. But sustained, uncertain waiting where nothing I do changes the timeline. Where my impatient energy has nowhere productive to go. Where the most loving thing I can do is simply... be.
Be with my wife, who sits beside me repeating her refrain: “Whatever it is, it is; we’ll face it together.”
Be with my own body, which is doing its cellular work regardless of my anxiety about it.
Be with the uncertainty, which cannot be hurried into resolution.
Be with God, who apparently thinks I need this particular curriculum.
III. The Precondition of Love: Bowlin’s Patient Charity
Let me tell you about patience.
Not as abstraction. Not as nice religious sentiment. But as moral architecture—the foundation on which every other virtue depends.
Here’s why this matters: if impatience threatens what I most cherish—the people I love, the country we share—then learning patience might be what could heal both. John Bowlin gives us the grammar.
John Bowlin, in a book that should be required reading for anyone pretending to do political theology, argues that patience is not one virtue among many. It’s the tempo-setter for all the rest. It’s what makes charity possible rather than a performance. It’s what prevents justice from becoming revenge. It’s what allows tolerance to be genuine rather than seething suppression.
“Patience sets the tempo of charity,” Bowlin writes. And this is where it gets interesting for those of us waiting for cells to divide in a Petri dish somewhere in Minnesota.
The Architecture: Patience → Tolerance → Forbearance
Bowlin maps a progression:
Patience is the foundational virtue—the ability to endure difficulty without either collapsing into despair or lashing out in rage. It’s temporal discipline. It’s staying in the tempo rather than rushing or dragging. It’s the virtue that makes time your ally rather than your enemy.
Tolerance builds on patience—it’s the civic face of patient endurance. Tolerance says: “I disagree with you profoundly, find your position objectionable, even offensive. But for the sake of our common life, for peace that enables flourishing, I will endure the tension of our difference without trying to eliminate you.” Not indifference. Not relativism. But active, difficult endurance of persistent disagreement.
Forbearance is patience and tolerance transfigured by charity into something even more demanding: ecclesial patience. Forbearance says: “You have offended me personally. You have hurt me, betrayed me, disappointed me. And for your good—not just for public peace but for your good—I will bear with you, correct you when needed, but refuse to abandon you or seek revenge.”
These three aren’t separate virtues but one virtue practiced at increasing intensity: in personal life (patience), in civic life (tolerance), in church life (forbearance).
And all three require the same thing: mastery of tempo.
Two Tempos: Anxious vs. Forbearing
Bowlin contrasts two ways of inhabiting time:
Anxious waiting: This is my default. This is the man in a hurry. This tempo says: “Something must happen NOW. Resolution must come IMMEDIATELY. I cannot bear this tension, this uncertainty, this not-knowing. DO SOMETHING.” Anxious waiting is really a refusal to wait. It’s frantic action masquerading as presence. It’s the Rescuer checking his watch, tapping his foot, barely suppressing the urge to fix what he cannot actually fix.
Forbearing waiting: This is what I’m learning in the most humiliating way possible. This tempo says: “I will stay here. I will remain present. I will neither force resolution nor escape into distraction. I will endure this moment, this day, this week, however long it takes, because some things cannot be rushed and trying to rush them destroys the very goods we’re seeking.”
The difference isn’t passive vs. active. Both are active. The difference is what kind of action: the action of control or the action of companionship. The action of management or the action of presence.
Bowlin’s most devastating line: “Resentment freezes time in the injury; patience moves through time in hope.”
Resentment—and its cousin impatience—stop time. They loop the moment of wounding, the moment of threat, the moment of insufficiency, playing it over and over. “This shouldn’t be happening. This must stop. This must be fixed RIGHT NOW.” Time becomes the enemy. Every moment that passes without resolution is another moment of suffering that could have been prevented if only someone had acted fast enough.
But patience moves through time. It accepts time as the medium in which goods actually become real. It trusts process. It waits for the bread to rise, the wound to heal, the pathology report to arrive when the pathologists have actually done their work rather than when my anxiety demands answers.
This is harder than it sounds. Much harder. Because everything in me wants resolution now. Everything in me believes that waiting is wasting. That patience is passivity.
But patience treats time as companion rather than enemy. And in so doing, it makes charity possible.
Why This Matters for Everything Else
Here’s why Bowlin’s framework is not some nice academic theory but actual lifeline. Let me start with what I know best—the place where my impatience does the most damage.
For my marriage: My wife has borne the cost of this impatience more than anyone. Sue Johnson, the attachment therapist who revolutionized couples work, talks about the “attachment bond”—that fundamental connection we’re wired to protect. In codependency, I’ve got a 360-degree phased array Aegis radar system hypervigilantly scanning for any threat to our attachment bond. And when I detect one—a moment of my wife’s stress, a hint of disappointment, any sign that she might be upset—it’s a problem that must be fixed immediately. Data comes online, running calculations: “If I just say this, do that, anticipate her needs before she knows them, demonstrate my value through competence...” Beast lurks underneath, ready to roar if my fixing doesn’t work. Gollum whispers that I should just give up and eat ice cream.
It would never occur to me that waiting might be a strategy rather than a cop-out. That maybe she doesn’t need me to fix her stress. That maybe being with her in it matters more than eliminating it. That maybe my frantic management creates more distance than the problem I’m trying to solve. That maybe—this is the hardest one—she won’t leave me if I stop performing.
Impatience born of terror masquerading as love. This is what codependency does: it takes the genuine desire for connection and weaponizes it into control. Bowlin names it precisely: when you can’t wait, you can’t love. Because love requires the patience to let the other be who they are, feel what they feel, struggle with what they’re struggling with—without immediately swooping in to manage it all.
Johnson calls this the “Protest Polka”—one partner pursuing connection through fixing/managing, the other withdrawing from the intensity of it. This dynamic is remarkably common across relationships; the specific roles may shift, but the underlying pattern of anxious pursuit and defensive withdrawal appears frequently in couples work. I’m the classic pursuer: the more anxious I get about the attachment bond, the more I try to solve/fix/manage, which creates exactly the distance I’m terrified of.
My wife, bless her, has learned to say: “I don’t need you to fix this. I need you to just be here.” Which is the hardest thing Data can possibly hear, because Data only knows how to analyze and solve. Being present without fixing feels like abandoning her. But it’s actually the opposite: it’s trusting that our attachment bond doesn’t depend on my performance. It’s practicing patience as the precondition for love.
For MAGA Christianism: The same impatient resentment shows up at scale. “Our country is being stolen. Our culture is being destroyed. We must ACT NOW to take it back.” Every political season becomes apocalyptic urgency. Every cultural shift becomes existential threat. Time is the enemy because it brings more change, more displacement, more loss of the world we thought was secure. So we must stop time, reverse time, make time go backward to when things were “right.” Impatient resentment weaponized as political theology.
For Providential Identitarianism—that mirror-image mutation showing up in progressive spaces, often among those who may not identify as Christian but still embody dominative patterns: The impatient resentment runs the other direction but shares the same tempo. “Justice delayed is justice denied. Systems of oppression grind on while we deliberate. People are suffering NOW and we must act IMMEDIATELY to dismantle the structures harming them.” Every policy debate becomes moral emergency. Every insufficient response becomes complicity. Time is the enemy because every moment that passes before justice is another moment of suffering that could have been prevented. Impatient resentment weaponized as prophetic urgency.
Both mutations substitute urgency for faithfulness. Both demand immediate resolution of tensions that may require generations to transform. Both treat patience as vice—as passivity, complicity, cowardice—rather than as the precondition for genuine change.
But Bowlin sees what both mutations miss: without patience, charity becomes coercion. Without the discipline of time, “love” becomes management. “Justice” becomes revenge. “Truth” becomes domination.
Codependency, too, is impatient love. It’s the terror that if you don’t fix them RIGHT NOW, something terrible will happen and you’ll be responsible. It’s love that cannot bear the other’s suffering long enough for the other to actually grow through it. It’s the Rescuer whose “help” prevents the very maturation the other needs.
Patience isn’t passive. It’s the hardest active work there is: staying present without controlling the outcome.
IV. The Long Week: Learning to Wait Without Controlling
The urologist’s office said about a week for results. Maybe a bit longer depending on the pathologist’s workload.
Which means I get more time in the only seminary I never wanted to attend: the School of Involuntary Patience.
Every day, I practice not checking my patient portal obsessively. (I fail at this. Multiple times daily.) Every conversation with my wife includes the unspoken reality: we’re waiting for news that will determine what comes next.
And every night, Gollum takes over. The dreams come reliably now: I’m back in the urologist’s office, and he’s delivering news about a future Gleason score—not this one, but the one five years from now, or ten. Sometimes it’s still 3: vindication, I made perfect decisions, my vigilant monitoring saved me. Sometimes it’s jumped to 8 or higher: complete disaster, everything collapses, and it’s all my fault for choosing wrong.
Calvin’s factory runs double shifts in the dark. My imagination—that “perpetual factory of idols”—generates elaborate false futures to worship or fear. The idol of Control: if I just make the perfect decision... The idol of Vindication: the numbers will prove I was right... The idol of Catastrophe: everything will collapse and I’ll deserve it...
Gollum clutches these dream-scenarios like “my precious,” cycling through them compulsively. It’s catastrophizing masquerading as preparation. It’s anxiety pretending to be prudence. It’s actually escape—from the one thing I cannot escape: this present moment where I don’t yet know and cannot make it resolve faster.
Gollum prefers imagined catastrophes to uncertain presence. At least in the dream, I’m doing something—even if that something is just rehearsing disaster. Action, even futile action, feels better than the vulnerable stillness of waiting.
This is shorter than the amyloidosis wait—that required weeks for Mayo Clinic’s specialized analysis. But the anxiety feels just as acute. The not-knowing just as difficult to bear. The factory of false futures just as relentless.
But here’s what I’m learning: this is the practice. Not the having of results. The waiting for them.
The pathology lab—wherever it is, whoever is examining my cells—has become my unlikely spiritual director. Not through what it will tell me eventually, but through what it’s teaching me now: I cannot hurry this process. I cannot control the timeline. I cannot manage my way to resolution. I can only... wait.
And in waiting, discover whether I can actually be with rather than work for.
Paul understood waiting at cellular depth. “The whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth,” he wrote, “and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22-23). The pathology lab examines my cells while I wait; Paul says the Spirit groans in those cells, laboring toward redemption. My waiting isn’t just mine—it participates in creation’s larger groaning toward healing. The Spirit doesn’t eliminate the wait; the Spirit groans with me through it.4
V. What Jazz Teaches That Domination Cannot
Jeremy Begbie, in his musical theology, writes about “holy delay.” He means the way musical tension creates meaning precisely by deferring resolution. A skilled jazz pianist will sit on a dissonant chord, let it hang in the air, refuse to resolve it immediately, creating a tension that makes the eventual resolution more meaningful—more beautiful—for having been delayed.
“The rest,” Begbie insists, “is as essential as the note.”
The silence between sounds isn’t empty. It’s generative. It’s the space in which the next sound can arrive with proper weight. Rush to fill it, and you destroy the music. Miles Davis understood this better than almost anyone: his genius wasn’t just in the notes he played but in the silences he left. Silence as active presence. Silence as patient restraint. Silence as faith that the music will continue without your needing to fill every moment.
This is what the tunnel taught me for an hour: finding the groove in the grinding. Learning to inhabit the MRI’s relentless rhythm without fighting it, letting it become something like meditation, something like prayer.
But this—this weeks-long wait for pathology—is harder. The tunnel had an end. Sixty minutes and done. This has no definite endpoint. This is sustained apprenticeship in patience. This is learning to stay in a groove that has no clear resolution, trusting that resolution will come but cannot be forced.
Augustine wrote that time itself is constituted by memory, attention, and expectation—how we hold past, present, and future together in consciousness. Without the capacity to attend to what’s absent (what has passed, what has not yet come), there would be no experience of duration, no narrative, no meaning. The silence between the notes is where time lives, where God meets us in the tension of not-yet and no-longer.
Rushing destroys the music. Impatience fills every space with noise—activity, distraction, management, anything to avoid the discomfort of not-knowing. But patience sits with the dissonance. Patience trusts that the chord will resolve when resolution becomes possible, not when anxiety demands it.
The biopsy wait is jazz writ large. Dissonance sustained. Tension held. Resolution deferred not as cruelty but as the only way the music can mean what it needs to mean.
Begbie again: “Music schools us in hope.” Not cheap optimism that everything will be fine. But theological hope: the conviction that we can live faithfully in the tension, that the waiting itself has formative purpose, that God is present not just at resolution but in the endurance.
Tempo as theological virtue.
VI. Incarnational Grammar: What My Wife Teaches
“Whatever it is, it is. We’ll face it together.”
My wife keeps saying this. Different words, same meaning. “We’ll handle it.” “You’re not alone in this.” “Whatever the results, we’re together.”
She’s not trying to fix it. She’s not trying to manage my anxiety. She’s not offering false reassurance that everything will be fine. She’s doing something harder and more beautiful: she’s practicing incarnational presence.
This is what Being With looks like when you can’t work for.
And here’s the profound irony: I’m the priest. I’m the one who’s supposed to understand incarnational theology. I’m the one who’s written and preached about God’s refusal to fix humanity from a distance, choosing instead to enter into solidarity with us, to share our condition, to be with us in suffering rather than solve our suffering from outside.
And now I’m receiving what I’ve proclaimed.
Her steady presence is more healing than any treatment plan. Her willingness to be uncertain with me rather than pretend she has answers neither of us possess—this is charity. This is patience in practice. This is the incarnational alternative to dominative theology.
She’s not controlling my cells (can’t be done). She’s not controlling the pathology timeline (can’t be done). She’s not controlling my anxiety (not her job). She’s simply staying. Present. Attentive. Available. Not fixing, just being with.
Kavin Rowe calls this “epistemic patience”—the willingness to learn from others through sustained presence rather than anxious management.5 Friendship, Rowe argues, isn’t achieved through mastery or control but through the patient work of being with another person in their otherness. My wife practices friendship toward me, toward my body, toward our uncertain future. She refuses to dominate the story by forcing resolution. This is incarnational presence at its most concrete: love that waits.
My wife sometimes worries I theologize my pain too quickly; she’s usually right. But in this waiting, theology and experience have merged. The personal becomes parable not through my interpretation but through the structure of the experience itself.
Paul Kalanithi, the neurosurgeon who wrote When Breath Becomes Air after his own cancer diagnosis, understood this reversal. He spent years as the physician explaining diagnoses to terrified patients. Then he became the terrified patient receiving diagnosis from physicians. The one who understood death professionally now had to face it personally. The one who offered presence to others now needed to receive it himself.
Priest becoming patient. The one who walked others through cancer valley now walking it himself. Learning to receive the companionship he’s offered, discovering it costs more—requires more vulnerability—than he ever understood when he was the one offering it.
The body betrays you. The mind creates personas you didn’t choose. The imagination forges idols you don’t intend. Three factories running, production never stopping. And dominative theology’s response—control it, shame it, repress it, manage it, fix it—fails utterly.
But incarnational presence says: I’ll sit with you in this. I’ll wait with you. I’ll stay.
Whatever it is, it is. We’ll face it together.
The priest receiving what he’s preached. The theologian learning from tissue samples what I couldn’t learn in divinity school: that incarnational presence isn’t doctrine but discipline, that love’s proper tempo is learned in the body’s involuntary waiting. Strange grace, this forced curriculum.
VII. Still Waiting
As I write this, the results haven’t come back.
I don’t know what twelve tissue samples will reveal. I don’t know if I’m writing this from the beginning of a cancer journey or the end of a cancer scare. I don’t know if next month brings surgery or relief or something in between.
I only know this: the pathologists are doing their work at their pace, not mine. The cells they’re examining divided according to their own logic, not my preferences. And I’m learning—slowly, reluctantly, with frequent backsliding—to wait.
Not passively. Not fatalist. But with patient charity. With forbearing presence. With the discipline of time that makes love possible.
The factories keep running. My prostate keeps producing. My mind keeps creating. My psyche keeps adapting. I cannot stop being generative. I can only learn to live with what I generate—acknowledging it, naming it, stewarding it, refusing to either worship it or wage war against it.
This, I suspect, is what the cancer valley teaches: you cannot dominate your way to health. You can only learn to be with your own vulnerable, generative, mutating self. To treat your body not as machine to be controlled but as companion to be known. To acknowledge your personas not as enemies to be destroyed but as wounded children to be tended. To recognize your idols not as conquests for shame but as products of imagination requiring gentle redirection.
The waiting continues. The not-knowing persists. The tension remains unresolved.
Paul would call this apocalyptic interruption: not our virtue achieving patience but Christ’s faithfulness entering human impatience.6 What if the healing we need isn’t produced by better management—left or right, progressive or traditional—but comes as unilateral gift? What if patience is less about our discipline and more about participating in God’s own non-coercive tempo already at work in history?
But here’s the thing I haven’t said directly:
This isn’t metaphor. It’s ecclesiology—the study of how bodies function, fail, and might yet be healed.
I’ve been writing about my body. But I’ve been thinking about our body—the body politic that elected Donald Trump again on the same day I learned I had amyloidosis.
The American body is running three factories too. Our collective imagination forges political idols—strongmen saviors, revolutionary heroes, apocalyptic enemies—at rates that would impress Calvin. Our social tissue keeps dividing—red cells and blue cells, each convinced the other is cancerous, each demanding the other be excised. Our national psyche has generated autonomous personas—MAGA’s Beast roaring against displacement, Progressivism’s Data calculating moral purity scores, both oscillating between shame and shamelessness, neither able to simply be with the other.
And Election Day 2024 brought the diagnosis: whatever is wrong, it’s progressing.
So here we are, the whole country lying in the medical gown of uncertainty, waiting for pathology reports that will tell us whether this is treatable or terminal. Both sides running their own Gleason calculations in the dark: If we just get the Senate... If we just expose their corruption... If we just purge the moderates... Both sides catastrophizing, both clinging to dream-futures like Gollum with his precious, both desperately trying to escape the unbearable present where we don’t yet know and cannot make it resolve faster.
And both sides absolutely certain that impatience is virtue. That waiting is betrayal. That the other side’s patience is really cowardice or complicity or contemptible weakness.
But Bowlin saw what we’re missing: “Resentment freezes time in the injury; patience moves through time in hope.”
What if the deepest wisdom for this political moment isn’t more urgent action but sustained presence? What if the republic doesn’t need more Data frantically calculating or more Beast roaring or more Gollum catastrophizing, but more Captain learning to coordinate these wounded parts toward something other than mutual destruction?
What if we can’t dominate our way to national health any more than I can dominate my way to bodily health?
What if—and here’s the scandal—what if learning to wait together is itself the practice that could heal us?
Not passive waiting. Not fatalist acceptance. But Bowlin’s patient charity: the discipline of time that allows genuine change rather than just winning the next news cycle. The forbearance that can bear offense for the other’s good, not just for public peace. The tolerance that sustains difference without either indifference or domination.
“Whatever it is, it is. We’ll face it together.”
My wife keeps saying this about my cells. But I keep hearing it about our country.
The American body is mutating. Some of those mutations may be malignant—genuine threats to the body’s survival. Some may be adaptive responses to changed conditions that we’re misreading as threats. Some may be panic responses that mimic both. We won’t know until the pathology comes back—and by “pathology,” I mean history, which moves at its own pace regardless of our anxiety about it. In politics, as in medicine, impatient attempts to excise what we fear often do more damage than the mutations themselves.
But here’s what I’m learning, both lying on exam tables and reading political news: the factories won’t stop. American culture will keep generating. Our political imagination will keep forging idols. Our social divisions will keep reproducing. We cannot shame the body politic into not mutating. We cannot repress our differences through force of will. We cannot dominate our way to unity.
Which means dominative politics—left or right, red or blue, revolution or restoration—cannot work. For all their promises of control, all their urgent demands for immediate action, all their techniques of shame and rage and purity—the factories won’t stop.
So the question isn’t “how do we shut down the opposition?” but “how do we learn to live with ceaseless generativity without it destroying us?”
And Bowlin whispers the answer the whole country needs to hear: Patience sets the tempo of charity.
We need to learn to wait. Together. Not for permission to act, but for the right tempo of action. Not abandoning conviction, but refusing to let urgency destroy the very goods we’re trying to protect. Not eliminating tension, but learning to sit with it long enough that something genuinely new can emerge rather than just another iteration of the same exhausted patterns.
The pathology lab forces me into this practice whether I want it or not. The body politic has no such luxury—we can keep choosing impatient resentment, keep demanding immediate vindication, keep catastrophizing our way through each news cycle.
Or we can choose something harder: the patient charity that moves through time in hope.
The rest is as essential as the note. The waiting is the practice. The not-knowing-yet is where we learn whether we can be with each other rather than just work against each other.
I’m learning it with twelve tissue samples and a week that feels eternal.
Twelve clicks. Twelve notes. Each one a measure in the song of waiting.
Whatever it is, it is. Can we face it together?
To be continued when time ripens enough for revelation—mine and ours.
Reader Reflection
Where in your life right now are you being forced into waiting?
What’s your default tempo: anxious hurrying or forbearing patience?
Who has practiced “being with” you when you needed it most?
What factory in your life keeps running despite your desire to shut it down?
Where do you see America being forced into waiting right now? What would patient charity look like in your community’s response?
Next in this series: Why shame hurts more than anything else, and what that reveals about being human.
Sources Referenced:
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Book XI, chapters 14-28
Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
John Bowlin, Tolerance Among the Virtues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)
John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1988)
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960)
Douglas A. Campbell, Beyond Justification: Paul’s Vision of Participation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024)
Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009)
Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022)
Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989)
Susan Eastman, Oneself in Another: Participation and Personhood in Pauline Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023)
Vincent J. Felitti et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14, no. 4 (1998): 245-258
Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2008)
Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (New York: Random House, 2016)
Stephen B. Karpman, “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis,” Transactional Analysis Bulletin 7, no. 26 (1968): 39-43
C. Kavin Rowe, “Making Friends and Comparing Lives,” in Method, Context, and Meaning in New Testament Studies (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 523-565
Richard C. Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1995)
Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)
Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)
Samuel Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology: A Christocentric View of God’s Purpose (Cambridge University Press: 2025)
Author’s Note
This essay was written during the week between prostate biopsy and pathology results, October 2025. The waiting described here was real-time spiritual practice, not retrospective reflection. Whatever diagnosis eventually arrives, the practice of patience—personal and political—continues.
Postscript: The prostate biopsy results came back benign! The relief is real. But what I learned in that week of not-knowing—about patience, about presence, about the factories that won’t stop—remains true. Personal reprieve doesn’t change the larger diagnosis: we still need to learn how to wait together.
Calvin on the Factory of Idols: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.11.8. Original Latin: “Hominis ingenium perpetuam, ut ita loquar, esse idolorum fabricam.” Calvin explains why the human mind inexhaustibly produces false images of God apart from revelation.
Cancer as Plagiarism: Oncologists describe cancer as “clonal expansion of mutated cells”—the technical term for what happens when a single mutated cell reproduces unchecked, creating colonies of genetic copies that have departed from the body’s original blueprint. The plagiarism metaphor captures both the copying mechanism and the deviation from the original text.
Susan Eastman, Oneself in Another: Participation and Personhood in Pauline Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023). Eastman argues that Paul understood what therapy is rediscovering: we don’t heal our divided selves through sheer willpower or by eliminating our wounded parts. We heal by allowing God’s Spirit to enter our inner chaos and by practicing vulnerable friendship with others. The factories keep running, but they can be inhabited differently when we stop trying to be self-sufficient and start living in relationship.
Eastman, Oneself in Another. See note 3 for full citation.
C. Kavin Rowe, “Making Friends and Comparing Lives,” in Method, Context, and Meaning in New Testament Studies(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 548-551, 563-565. Rowe argues that friendship requires epistemic patience—the willingness to learn from others through sustained presence rather than anxious management. This patience creates the conditions for genuine understanding across difference, refusing both relativism and domination.
I learned to read Paul apocalyptically from Douglas A. Campbell, whose work demonstrates that salvation isn’t a contract we fulfill but an invasion we receive—God’s unilateral liberation of enslaved humanity through Christ’s faithfulness. Campbell’s critique of “contractual” soteriology (what he calls “Justification Theory”) parallels the critique of dominative theology in this essay: both treat control as the solution when control is actually the problem. The “factories” keep running not because we lack willpower but because we’re captive to systems of anxiety and performance. Christ’s faithfulness doesn’t optimize our self-management; it apocalyptically interrupts it. See Campbell, Beyond Justification: Paul’s Vision of Participation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024), The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), and Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022).
Love this perspective on waiting; it makes you wonder what if our bodies were open-source code we could just debug for these complex sistem.
Craig - loved reading this insightful, intellectual, personal, and theological article on so many levels! I think you need to become a college professor or publish a much needed book on this subject!! Waiting is certainly part of the human experience and journey that most of us struggle with in many different ways- some healthy and many unhealthy ways. Thanks for sharing!!!