SundayReflection

  10^th September 2023

Jade Mazarin explains

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God Is Working in Your Waiting

Most parents would agree that their children don't want to wait for anything.

The last thing kids want to hear is Mum say is, "Not now."
It can prompt anger, frustration, even hopelessness. This "dis-ease" of waiting follows most of us into our adult years.

And our modern society just makes it worse.
We want everything done quickly - and new devices constantly spring up to meet those demands and encourage our impatience.

We are not used to waiting, and the more our technology caters to our immediate desires, the less we feel willing to wait.

Such is our dilemma as Christians. While society makes every attempt to make our life easier and faster, God works on a very different timetable. In his mind, nothing is wrong with waiting. In fact, waiting can actually be a positive good that he often uses to make us more like his Son.

"There is actually something happening while nothing is happening. God uses waiting to change us."

The story of Adam and Eve is a story of rebellion against God.
Once they believed that God didn't have their best interests in mind, they decided to go ahead without God and do what they wanted. They became, in effect, their own god.

Too often, this is exactly what we do today.
When God tells us to wait, we don't trust him, but go ahead and find ways to accomplish what we want to happen.

This tendency to push God to the side goes against his plan for us.
It creates distance in our relationship with him. It causes us to get into trouble and brings pain.
What good is it to gain the whole world now - whatever it is we think we want - and forfeit our souls' intimacy with God?

God wants us to learn how to follow him and put down our demanding selves - to calm that screaming child in us. One way he helps us do this is to say, "Wait."

That miserable, uncomfortable, sometimes painful state of silence is one of God's most powerful tools to set us free.
If we are willing, that is.

We don't start out willing to wait.
By God's grace, we can choose to wait as he intends.
"It's staying at your appointed place while he says stay, or it's going at his appointed pace while he says go".

We have the choice, then, to take a deep breath, release our clenched hands, and let God be God. And we are invited to continue hoping in his greatness.

Certainly, only one of these options will bring us joy.
As we seek to accept and rejoice in God's handling of our lives, including his timing, we can ask God to work in us two main things, so that our waiting is not in vain: humility and trust.

Believing God is loving means that there is care and purpose behind all that he does.
It means that he is faithful to help us right now and bring us blessings later.
It means that his judgment and timing is always perfectly good.
True, he owes us nothing, yet he has promised to give us everything we need.

Some of the greatest figures in the Bible -
Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David - had to wait for many years for God's promises.
Everything that happened in the meantime was used to prepare them, inwardly as well as outwardly.
Then, when they reached their promise, they were blessed beyond measure.

God invites us to trust in his goodness today and his faithfulness tomorrow.
Relinquishing control to him is the main route to experience his love and peace.
It unites our hearts with his.

It creates a level of maturity and character that we will take with us into the future, and it enables us to enjoy his future blessings all the more.

Un-edited version and Bible references avaiable, on request

Jade Mazarin
is a board-certified Christian counsellor in Vero Beach, Florida.
She is the author of The Heart's Journey to Freedom, and writes at her site, JadeMazarin.net.