Wait

 Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. (Psalm 27:14)

 

Is there anything harder? It’s hard to have to wait for traffic lights, check out lines, or phone calls, but you have waited at the same lights and you know they’ll change. Check out lines shrink over time, and you get to step forward. And if nothing else, you can call the person who is failing to call you. It’s worse when we have to wait for pain to subside or problems to be solved. Having to wait for God has to be the worst. After all, we’re told that God is all powerful, and loving. If He’s so powerful, how can He be loving if He does not act? It’s an old question, but it describes our response when we pray, or ask, or beg, or scream, and God doesn’t answer. After all, isn’t the Lord supposed to be our Shepherd, providing so that we shall not want?

 

On the other side of the equation, there’s the painful “Hall of Faith” in Hebrews 11, where we’re told that those who kept waiting, but did not receive what they waited for during their lifetimes are the folks of whom the world is not worthy. How can we help but ask “Why Lord?”

Why should we wait? Why should we have to wait? One answer that deserves consideration is that God is God, and we are not. If God could be obligated to meet our needs within a specific time span, that obligation would make Him our slave, and us His god. Some might say that this means God is petty or holding on to His power for fear of being replaced. But the problem with this is that if we try to take His place, we are just as guilty of being petty as we claim He is for keeping it. It wouldn’t be healthy for either God or us to give us everything we want or to let us take His place. Learning to endure delayed gratification makes us stronger.

We may grant that, but what about the times when we’re not being childish, greedy, or unreasonable? Why does God make people wait when it’s important? Why must we wait when we’re in pain, or depressed, or afraid? In a sense, this is the same question throwing in an appeal to pity. It’s natural that we would want the pain to go away, but ultimately, it’s a claim that everything should be made to be as we want. In another way, it’s even worse. We aren’t usurping God’s place. When we are in pain, our universe tends to shrink to the pain and its cause. The pain becomes our god. The same is true of addiction, depression, fear, anger, hatred, or any strong feelings or emotions – especially the negative ones. As our universe shrinks, that feeling or emotion becomes our god.  Whatever controls our lives is our god.

So if God wants to be our God, shouldn’t He remove all those other false gods? If we never felt pain, it couldn’t control us. But that would make those same things god over God and us, since He would have to respond even to the threat that we might experience them. The only means of removing those things, or anything else, from the throne of our lives, we must overcome them. Pain isn’t our god because we feel it. It is our god when we let it control and enslave us. Freedom is when those things no longer take God's place.

All of this is why we need to wait for the Lord, and keep our focus on Him.