Nobody tells you that most of the Christian life happens in the meantime.
[host: add one true, lived detail here to open: a real 'meantime' from your own week (a place, a moment, the specific unfinished thing you're sitting in right now). One concrete scene beats any amount of polish.]
Not at the beginning, when everything is new and you can feel it. Not at the end, when it all supposedly makes sense. The meantime — the long, unfinished middle, where the promise has been made but not kept yet, where the good and the bad are still tangled up in the same field, where you're pretty sure God is at work but you couldn't point to exactly where. That's where most of us actually live. And this week, sitting with the three readings from this past Sunday, I realized that's exactly where the church was trying to put us.
I'm Joe Stein, and on Monday to Sunday I come back midweek to the readings we heard on Sunday, the ones that land in church and then quietly leak out of our heads by about Wednesday. This week gave us three passages that look unrelated but are secretly asking the same question: what is God doing in the meantime? A man asleep in the middle of nowhere. Paul describing a whole creation groaning like it's in labor. And Jesus telling a story about a farmer who refuses to pull the weeds. Here's where they took me.
Surely the Lord Is in This Place: Jacob at Bethel
The first reading (Genesis 28:10–19a) finds Jacob at his lowest. He's running. He's just swindled his brother out of a blessing, his brother wants him dead, and he's fleeing the only home he's ever known with almost nothing. The text is bleak on purpose: "He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set." No inn. No welcome. The sun went down, so he stopped where he was, grabbed a rock for a pillow, and lay down in the dirt.
And that random patch of ground, on the worst night of his life, is where heaven opens. Jacob dreams of a ladder set up on the earth with its top reaching into heaven, angels going up and down, and God standing beside him with an enormous promise: I am with you, I will keep you wherever you go, I will not leave you. He wakes up and says the line I can't stop thinking about: "Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it." He slept right through it.
There's a Hebrew word doing quiet work under this whole story: makom, which just means "place." It repeats over and over: a certain place, this place, how awesome is this place. Nothing fancy. But later, in Jewish tradition, HaMakom ("the Place") becomes one of the actual names for God. God is called the Place because God is the place where everything else exists. The world doesn't contain God; God contains the world. You can feel that idea being born right here in Jacob's nowhere. He thinks the spot is random. What he discovers is that it was never random, because the One who holds every location was already there, under the dirt he was sleeping on.
The Groaning Is Labor, Not Death: Paul in Romans 8
Carry Jacob into the second reading (Romans 8:12–25), because Paul takes that exact feeling (God is here but I can barely tell) and gives it a name: hope.
First he says something settled and staggering. You didn't receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear; you received a spirit of adoption, and now you get to cry "Abba! Father!" You're not a servant sweating for approval out in the field. You're an heir. That's done. And then, in the same breath, Paul describes the meantime as honestly as anyone ever has: "the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves… groan inwardly while we wait."
Notice the picture. Not a tidy garden, but a delivery room. And notice what kind of groaning it is. It isn't the groan of something dying. It's the groan of something being born. Labor pains are the most hopeful pain there is, because the pain is proof that something is on the way. Then Paul lands it: "in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope… if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." Hope, by definition, is the thing you can't see yet. The not-seeing is what hope is made of. You're in labor. The ache is a sign it's coming.
Let Both Grow Together: The Wheat and the Weeds
Then Jesus, in the Gospel (Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43), names the hardest part of the meantime: that while you wait, the good and the bad grow in the same field. A farmer sows good seed, but while everyone's asleep (there's that sleep again) an enemy sows weeds all through it, and they come up tangled together. The workers want to charge in and rip the weeds out now. And the farmer says no: "in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest."
Let both grow together. That's one of the harder things Jesus ever says, because everything in us wants the field sorted today: the good separated from the bad, the accounts settled, the judgment handed down while we're watching. Jesus says: not yet. You don't have the eyes to sort it cleanly, and it isn't harvest time. There will be a harvest. But not by your hand, and not in the meantime. Your job isn't to be the reaper. Your job is to be the wheat.
A Line to Say Over Your Own Nowhere
Put the three together and they're aimed right at how we actually live. We hate the meantime. We want the burning bush, not the dark field; the verdict now, the promise cashed today. And when we get the long unfinished middle instead, the prayer not answered yet, the mess that's still a mess, we assume something's gone wrong, that God has left the place.
These readings are the church putting a hand on your shoulder and saying: no. This is what the meantime is supposed to feel like. God is in the place, even when you sleep through it. The groaning is labor, not death. The field is allowed to be mixed for now, because the harvest is real but it isn't today.
So here's what I'd leave you with. Somewhere in your life right now there's a "certain place", a nowhere, a worst-night patch of dirt where you're sure nothing holy is happening. This week, try saying Jacob's line over it on purpose, before you can feel it's true: Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it. Because the meantime isn't God's absence. It's where he does almost all of his best hidden work. You're not waiting for him to show up. You're asleep on the very place where he already is.
Listen to the full episode of Monday to Sunday for the whole walk through Jacob, Paul, and that stubborn farmer. I'm Joe Stein. See you Thursday.