So if we are a slaves to time, why are there so many examples of waiting in scripture?
- Abraham: Waited 25 years for his promised son, Isaac
- Jacob: Waited 14 years to marry his beloved
- Joseph: Waited 13 years in prison for his sufferings to be redeemed
- Moses: Waited 40 years before leading the Israelites out of Egypt
- David: Waited about 15 years between being anointed as king and taking the throne
- Israel had to wait 400 years in Egypt. And after the exile there are another 400 years of waiting before Jesus is born.
- Jesus: Waited 30 years before fulfilling his Father's will
And finally, “On one occasion, while He (Jesus) was eating with them, He gave them this command: ‘Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised…’” —Acts 1:4
There is a biblical precedent behind Jesus’s command to His disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the gift of the Holy Spirit. They had just finished waiting for what seemed like an eternity between the death and resurrection of Jesus, surely He was not requiring them to endure more time between achieving what they assumed were His goals of setting up His earthly kingdom.
Our faith in God is often tested in the waiting periods. It is one of the most difficult times because we can easily slip into cruise control and become complacent in our relationship with God. Others may lean on their own abilities and strategies in a God-given task and take it on without Him. Times of waiting and not knowing are meant to foster our dependence on God and deepen our trust in Him. We should always be ready to move, but only in God’s timing. He is the orchestrator and will be the One to open the right doors at the right time so that He may accomplish through us His perfectly timed work.
What happens to us while we wait is sometimes more important than the fulfillment of what we are waiting for.
Another byproduct of waiting is the tension between waiting and action. Most of us desire to be people of action, and resting and waiting seem to be the enemy of both. So instead of being obedient to our call to wait, we redouble our efforts and plunge headlong into lives of hurry. Hurry becomes our new mantra, and unfortunately, one of the first casualties of hurry is the trait of viewing people as obstacles toward meeting our goals. Put even more bluntly, hurry has a bad habit of transforming our ability to care into apathy for those who most need our care.
So it's pretty clear in the Bible that waiting is an important (and necessary) part of life. God calls us to live a great deal of our lives is in what we might be described as the margins of our life. Jesus lived thirty of his years in relative obscurity, the years before His ministry lost to history. Would any of us argue that those were wasted years?
Which begs the question from God's perspective, could it be that God doesn't place the same weight on the things that we deem as greatly important which maybe means the smaller (what appears to be almost wasted) things in our life (such as waiting) are more important than we can imagine?
Romans 8:24-25 says, "Hope that is seen is not hope at all. Who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."
I'll close with a famous prayer:
Patient Trust
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
