Light falls slow. Voices lower and fade in the distance. A clocks ticks once, twice, and then strangely seems to stop altogether. Silence is synonymous with waiting. 

 The hallway is no more a destination than the fabled train station. People swing backpacks, rub shoulders only in passing. You wait with your back against the beige wall. You are brushed past, barely noticed—you feel as much a wallflower as Jo March at her first dance. 

 When the last student has closed the last classroom door and the bell has rung, silence pools in a great circle around you. The hallway is filled with that cinematic half-light that filters in through the windows and lets you catch glimpses of glimmering dust falling to the floor. And the silence isn’t a Simon and Garfunkel terror but somehow a soft release. 

 Remember when your childhood was one long summer afternoon? When the sun was warm on your back and the leaves were lazy in the breeze and the world made sense? You were waiting then too. Waiting for the days when the clock wouldn’t have a bearing on bedtime, when screen time would no longer be a delegated privilege, when you could put away childish things. 

 And now you’re waiting in the hallway. Life makes full circles and laughs ironically. Now the clock dictates your bedtime more than it ever has; now you’ve set limits on your apps and you wish you had more boundaries; now you’re grasping for childish joys and realizing you can’t go back. 

 The year of Jubilee came around every forty-nine years for the Jews. Forty-nine years of grief upon grief, of callouses and debts and scars. They sent scapegoats into the desert and prayed for mercy. They sacrificed and pleaded and worked. Mostly they did a lot of waiting. 

 God met them in the silence. On top of mountains, in an inner room in a tent, in solitude. A still small voice that could only be heard in the waiting. 

 When the fire burns low and the night is all around like a live thing, when you’re wrung dry in a waiting room, when the fever breaks and you lift up your head to look out the window— God is here. In the silence, as you wait for Jubilee.