Wait

Endurance is not something typically glamorized either in the media or in contemporary Christian annals.  It is not faith but often an offspring of her.  The eject button symbolically represents the normal approach to difficulties, trials and painful circumstances.  If we are forced to go through something that is trying for any extended period of time, all too often we turn away from it and move to something else more rewarding.  Success resonates; forbearing carries an icy chill to the bones.  The problem with Biblical timelines is that they carry with them a fantasy feel.  One hundred years is just a quick descriptor we breeze past.  Forty years is a blink in a biographical account.  Seventy years is a parenthetical insert.  Yet the one hundred years of Noah were ten thousand days and a million hours.  The forty years of Moses were almost two generations...the time it takes to build a family and wave good-by to the kids as they put together families of their own.  The coming of the Messiah waited for entire civilizations to rise and fall a dozen times or more.  Now we wait again for our Lord to return and we face a most disconcerting Spiritual axiom.  God's people must wait.  They suffer.  They endure for lifetimes and across generations.  They wonder when the end will come and it doesn't.  They stand in line and their number doesn't get called.  Joshua waited eighty years for his day in the sun and impatient David ran for years from King Saul with no end in sight.  The character of the Christian is built upon the unyielding rock of waiting.  Waves of time beat against the stony fortress but it refuses to budge.  We must not think that we can force our will upon God's demand of standing still.  He will take the impatient soul and put him or her in a holding pattern until our Lord's character is developed within.  "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not upon your own understanding" has a context.  Almost always it is a wait that seems unreasonable and unbearable that pulls out such faith and makes it true.  Do we have enough time for God to work His life into us so that it is actual rather than imagined?  As impossible as it seems, thank the Lord for your times of waiting because in them, if you are trusting in Him, God will make you the sort of person He can use for divine purposes.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.    Psalm 130:5 NIV