Waiting (aka: the lesson that we keep learning until we ‘get it’, then we spend the rest of our lives ‘perfecting’ it) is an anchor that God uses to shape us like no other. An anchor, because it will either make you stand strong…or it will make you sink. [insert wink]
I was recently at a leadership class, and as a group we all were to write down an influential instance in our life that play a role in the spiritual, experiential, relational, or instructional process that developed a quality in our lives. After thinking for a while, I felt like God revealed to me that the periods of waiting (spiritual wilderness, unanswered prayers, etc) have shaped me more than no other. In that barren, quiet place, lonely place, secret place, where it’s raw…those were the moments where hope came alive as I savored every little bit of anything that the Lord gave to me. Maybe a promise in His word, a sweet knowing in my being, a brush with the incarnational stranger (messenger) that He spoke through, or that Scripture that I would cling to with all my might until reciting it was like breathing.
Frederick Buechner wrote in his book, Telling the Truth: the Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale,
And who are the few that hear it? They are the ones who labor and are heavy-laden like everybody else but who, unlike everybody else, know that they labor and are heavy-laden. They are the last people you might expect to hear it, themselves the bad jokes and stooges and scarecrows of the world, the tax collectors and whores and misfits. They are the poor people, the broken people, the ones who in terms of the world’s wisdom are children and madmen and fools. They have cut themselves shaving. Rich or poor, successes or failures as the world counts it, they are the ones who are willing to believe in miracles because they know it will take a miracle to fill the empty place inside them where grace and peace belong with grace and peace. Old Sarah with her China teeth knows it will take a miracle to fill the empty place inside her where she waits for a baby that will never come, so when the angel appears and tells her a baby is coming she laughs and Abraham laughs with her because, having used up all their tears, they have nothing but laughter left. Because although what the angel says may be too good to be true, who knows? Maybe the truth of it is that it’s too good not to be true.
So this is my ode to waiting. The beautiful desperation, the tool that my Master uses to draw me close to Him. “Father teach me how to wait. How to gaze at You, in spite of circumstance, sufferings, in the mundane as well as the exciting.”
Isaiah 40:28-31
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
References:
Buechner, Frederick. (1977). Telling the truth: The Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. NY: HarperCollins Publishers