Waiting…
Have you ever been trying to download something on your computer, and that silly little ball just keeps spinning and spinning while you wait for your page to come up?
That’s been happening a lot at this site the past few days. For whatever reason, the parent site has been experiencing trouble, which meant most of you couldn’t download the page, and I couldn’t post new columns.
But as I sat there waiting each time I tried to log in, I got to thinking. You see, waiting is old hat to a Christian. Our faith is based on waiting.
When we pray, we wait for a response. It may take as little as a few minutes, or it may take years for God to respond. After all it is in His time, not ours, and sometimes the answer may be “Yes” and sometimes “No.” And sometimes the answer is, “Not yet.” We ask, and then wait.
We wait to see where He will lead us in our path of life. Will we marry and have a family? Will we serve in the mission field? We watch, and we wait.
And we wait for the glorious day when Jesus returns. The day He takes us all to live eternally with the Father. We anticipate, and we wait.
Christian waiting serves so many purposes. It prepares us to have our real needs met. Psalm 40:1 says, “I waited patiently for the Lord to help me, and He turned to me and heard my cry.”
When we cry out to the Lord, whether in sorrow or pain, He hears us. He allows us the pain. It will cause us to grow, to lean on Him more heavily, to depend on Him to fill us so that He can lead us where He needs us, not where we want to be.
God doesn’t just have a vision for our lives, He knows our lives. He will use all the adversity to our benefit and to His glory.
But we want our solutions now. We want the pain to end now. We don’t have the vision. It is hard for us to think beyond the moment, much less far into the future. But God calls for us to be patient, to trust Him. He longs for us to turn our pain and hurt over to Him in prayer, to trust Him with it. He yearns for us to allow Him to comfort us.
In our rush to fix it, in our impatience, we fail to see His big picture, to see the glory that may come out of a sad, horrible, heartbreaking situation.
But it will only be in God’s time, so be patient. Be willing to wait, to see where He will lead. God will never, never fail you.
All He asks is that you wait for Him.
May 26th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Have you ever been trying to download something on your computer, and that silly little ball just keeps spinning and spinning while you wait for your page to come up?