Waiting.
In life, this is the single most difficult thing for me to
do. In line, in traffic, for a baby to decide he’s ready to be born (5 days
late), it is and has always been near torture for me. Why is this? I’ve been
asking myself this question over the past few months, and the answer I think comes
from my nature to control and from a deep restlessness, a need to always be doing. Because if I’m moving and doing
something productive, I must be in control. Right?
I had this crazy math teacher in high school. I can’t even
remember what year it was or what course she taught us, but I do remember her
talking about “the doldrums”. I think once she even drew a picture of a ship
out on a stagnant ocean. We made fun of her all year for it, but she was
teaching us an important lesson. The most dangerous and difficult place to be
is not in the center of a storm, but stuck in a place where barely a breeze is
blowing. Floating in the doldrums, the place that ship captains feared because
no amount of reinforcing the ship or teaching new skills to the crew members
could save you from weeks of no wind and a stagnant sea. Samuel Coleridge in
his very famous poem Rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner describes this place, and it resonates in my heart as the place I
am in right now.
All in a
hot and copper sky,
The
bloody Sun, at noon,
‘Right
up above the mast did stand,
No
bigger than the Moon.
Day
after day, day after day,
We
stuck, no breath no motion;
As idle
as a painted ship
Upon a
painted ocean.
Could there be a truer test for faith in God than this? Many
men run to God in a storm to save them, fewer men run to God in times of plenty
to thank Him, but fewer still run to Him in times of consistent and seemingly endless longsuffering, when God seems to not be moving. Well, we do in the beginning but after a while we give up. Because it is then when the lie of abandonment sneaks into our
hearts and tricks us into thinking that God must not care for us like we thought
He did. We may be important enough to keep alive, but just barely. Certainly
not important enough to deserve a strong wind at our back and clear skies
ahead.
When my dad died, now almost three months ago, I replayed
the song, “It Is Well With My Soul” over and over in my mind for weeks. I will
always associate that song with both happy and sad memories, and the vision of
a ship tossing about in a storm is so clear and vivid a reminder of that time.
But even a storm can distract us from God because there is something to fight. We have a role to play, even if our
job is just to get through the bad situation. Storms always end. It’s tough
while you’re in it but you come out the other side praising God for his goodness
to you during that time, and you share with others the things God taught you. However,
the biggest lesson in patience comes when the sea billows do not roll, but when
there is nothing to fear but that your circumstances will never change. That God must have forgotten about you. No man can
make the wind blow.
You can climb onto the sails and puff up your cheeks and blow
with all of your might, but the ship will not move. You can fight it as hard as
you like, pull out the paddles, readjust the sails, but at some point it will
be clear that you are totally not in control. The only thing to do is surrender:
your plans, your need to be moving, your timetable, and possibly even your very
survival. Sometimes when Christians are going through a long, tough time they
think that if they finally learn the
lesson God has for them to learn, finally
He will move in their lives. If they lay out their hands in surrender, He
will blow onto their sails. But surrender does not cause God to move, it allows
Him to change your focus from one of control (“When, God? How much longer?”),
to complete and utter lack of control (“I’m not worried. I’ll accept your
blessing when it comes”). In the same way, your lack of surrender is not
keeping God from moving. He is not dependant on you. He may just be reminding
you that you are dependant on Him. You may stare at an unchanging sea with
barely a ripple in the water for days, weeks, years. When He is not changing
your circumstances, He is very likely changing your heart.
The most frustrating part of this equation is when God has
given you a vision or a desire. You felt like He gave you a glimpse of what was
to come. You may have had a strong urge to move to a particular place, be in a
different job, start your family, start a ministry, and you feel or even know
in your heart that these desires are whispers from your Father. Yet, when you
try to make those things come to fruition, you fail. Chad has had more job
interviews than I can remember, and each time we thought we had felt a breeze. The wind is coming! God
is keeping His promise of a new job for Chad! And then the breeze died. And sometimes,
our faith died right along with it. I have known people who knew they were
supposed to be living in a different place. They couldn’t sell their house and
had to put off moving for years. God whispered to them a desire but it was not
yet His timing. Ever wonder why He keeps us in the dark sometimes? We hear that
whisper and start running, trying to make things happen ourselves. You want me to move? I’m ON IT. Or, when
we think a door is opening (a job interview, an offer on our house) we assume
that MUST be God. We felt a breeze,
so the wind must be coming!
But even when we’re pretty sure we have waited long enough,
that we have learned a lesson, that we have submitted our lives to God, He may
still ask us to wait in an unchanging sea. Even when we see other ships sailing
by, ships with our friends or relatives on them with the wind full at their
backs, He may still ask us to wait. Even when we have a mortgage to pay and no
money to pay it with, when we are on our last round of fertility treatments,
when we are still sick, when our job has become incredibly unfulfilling, He may
still ask us to wait. So, what to do then? Worship Him. Pray ceaselessly. Jesus
taught us how to pray, and even He asked for God to change his circumstances, but
he added “Not my will but Yours be done”. We can thank Him for our vision and
trust Him with its fruition. We can be witnesses for Him, hold the hands of
others who, like us, are in the doldrums and need a friend to wait with. We can
encourage each other, love each other, and cause people to wonder at the crazy
awesome Hope that we have.
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer self
is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed
day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal
weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are
seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are
transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:16-18
