The Word Comes to Those Who Wait

Learning to Receive the Word When He Speaks in Silence

“The friend of the Bridegroom stands and listens.”

— John 3:29

There is a waiting that is not delay, and a silence that is not absence.

There is a preparation so deep that it becomes a way of standing before God at every moment, ready to receive the Word whenever and however He chooses to speak.

St. John the Baptist lived this waiting from the beginning. The Gospel tells us that the word of God came to John in the wilderness. Not in the Temple. Not in the courts of power. Not when his life was settled or secure. The Word came to him in a place stripped of distraction, where hunger sharpened the ear and solitude purified desire.

John did not prepare himself to speak. He prepared himself to receive. His fasting, his solitude, his fierce simplicity were not spiritual techniques but acts of attention. He stood before God with his whole life, saying without words: Speak, Lord. I am listening.

And when the Word came, it did not come once. It came again and again: calling him to cry out, to decrease, to point away from himself toward Another. Each time John received the Word, it asked more of him. Each time it led him further into obscurity.

Yet the most difficult waiting was not in the desert. It was in the prison cell.

There, the Word that once thundered through the wilderness fell silent. The heavens did not open. The crowds were gone. The Messiah whom John had proclaimed walked freely while the forerunner remained bound. In that place, John did not receive explanations. He received only the choice to remain faithful without reassurance.

This is the waiting that purifies the heart.

In prison, John does not curse the silence. He sends his disciples not to demand answers, but to ask humbly: Are You the One? Even this question is an act of faith. He does not withdraw his life from God because God has withdrawn consolation. He remains oriented, open, listening, even when the Word no longer comes as speech but as surrender.

The final word John receives is not spoken to him at all. It is written in his martyrdom. The Word he welcomed from the beginning now asks him to give his life without seeing the fruit. He prepares one last time, not to act, not to go, not to understand, but to receive death as obedience.

This is not a tragic ending. It is the fulfillment of his waiting.

To prepare to receive the Word at every moment is to consent to a life where God speaks not only through clarity and direction, but through delay, obscurity, and apparent abandonment. It is to trust that the Word who once called us into the desert remains present even when the desert becomes a cell.

Waiting, then, is not inactivity. It is vigilance of heart. It is standing ready without grasping. It is refusing to force meaning where God is forming surrender.

The Word desires to speak to each soul personally, not always with answers, but with Himself. And sometimes the deepest word He speaks is this: Remain. Decrease. Trust Me here.

Blessed is the one who waits in this way. For such a soul becomes a dwelling place where the Word is always received: even when He comes hidden, bound, and crowned with silence.