Me: Hi Prodigal, what a nice day it is to be outside.
Prodigal: Yes I agree, I am waiting to meet a friend, but the friend is running late today. I am tired of just sitting here to be honest.
Me: Sometimes I am not so good at waiting myself. At times I really am not good at waiting on the Lord.
Prodigal: Yes I have heard people talk about waiting on the Lord but what does that really mean?
Me: Let me share what I have read about the topic.
My friend Laurie and I were talking about waiting for the Lord one night. She had come up with this topic growing weary in the waiting. I started reading some and came up with something that Robert Raines wrote in To Kiss the Joy that I think can help explain how we feel.
It’s only when you have to that you get interested in what it might mean to wait for the Lord. Waiting is a matter of letting it happen to you rather than doing it to somebody else. It’s a matter of being receptive rather than aggressive, of making ready rather than taking action, of letting yourself be vulnerable rather than protecting and defending. You and I are used to running things and people, being at the controls, giving orders, managing events, ordering children around, until one day it doesn’t work any more. Suddenly a door is slammed, or the bottom falls out, and we are powerless to control our future. Our strength is threatened or destroyed. Our future is in jeopardy. It is then that we begin to cry out “You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!” While we have our power, we don’t need to be patient. We can get along without self-knowledge; we can look with contempt upon the weak. When our power is taken from us, in humiliation we may begin to learn humility, to let things and people ripen at their own pace and not to manipulate or hurry them into change. When our power is taken from us, we may learn to respect the unfolding nature of events, to let it be, to let ourselves be, to let others be, to respect the fragility of another person enough to let them shape their own life and find their own fashion of rebirth. We may learn not to insist on our own way-like “I want it now, today, yesterday, my way”-but yield, to let the life process happen. We may learn to begin to trust the process, not to have to manage or control it, even to believe that it may work out better if many wills work together and somehow God’s purpose unfolds through the hidden coordination of it all.
Allowing someone to be them. Allowing God to be ruler. Allowing myself to let go. This all means waiting. What do you need to wait on today at this very minute? Who needs you to be patient? What would be so scary if we truly do just wait on the Lord? Do not let fear rule replace it with faith and allow God to show you how it will all unfold.
Psalm 27:14 Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.
Jennifer Van Allen,
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
