Answers

             Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’ (Jeremiah 33:3)

I’ve seen memes on social media in which someone says, in effect, that if you don’t answer their text within 30 seconds, there’s something wrong with you, you’re being rude, and you must not care for the person who texted. And I’m not talking about an urgent text, like, “The appointment ended early, can you pick me up?” It’s more like, “Good morning, did you sleep well?” Polite perhaps, but it’s not something that needs an immediate answer other than to gratify the ego of the person who sent it.

Then I consider my prayers this morning: Lord, touch my life, heal my brokenness, guide me, teach me, speak to me, conform me to the image of Your Son… They’re all great Sunday School prayers. I mean them all, but when I finish circling the part of the park where Grace is allowed, and nothing miraculous has happened, and I’ve had no major revelation, I get going on my day, and the next thing you know, it’s lunchtime, dinnertime, or bedtime and I have been getting things done but not actively thinking about God or His answering my prayers. In a way, I’m “past” them, no longer looking for an answer because it didn’t happen within that half hour.

Certainly, God could respond to our texts in the 30 seconds that might be said to be “immediately,” but He made Abram wait decades for a child. Moses spent 40 years as a shepherd before returning to Egypt to free his people, and another 40 years to come as close to completing the journey as he was permitted. Joseph spent years in prison. In Hebrews 11, it says that those who never gave up  hoping for what they didn’t see even though they never saw it are people of whom the earth is not worthy.

So when God tells Jeremiah  and/or the Israelites to call to Him, and He will answer and tell great and mighty things they don’t know, how long would it have been reasonable of them to wait to hear those great and mighty things? How long should we be willing to wait with hope for the answer? Ultimately, the answer should be that we are willing to wait forever, or that we should wait as long as it takes, but some of us are more time oriented and sometimes, even ridiculous numbers help us put it into perspective. If half a minute might count as “immediate” when dealing with a text message, then it comes to an “immediate” response in terms of a day, that would be roughly 12 hours. If we are thinking in terms of this week, “immediate” would be 3.5 days. If we’re thinking in terms of a lifetime, immediate might be said to be 40 to 50 years. And if we think in terms of eternity, immediate might be said to be thousands of years.

The point here isn’t to give legal boundaries by which God must act. It’s to broaden our own thinking. As we pray for good, big things, we should keep in mind that just as God is aware of our experience of time (having experienced it), we should be more aware of His broader view. It’s not entirely timeless, but His “immediate” may not be ours.