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
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