Waiting Ain’t Easy
David Orendorff · Psalm 130 · August 13, 2006
Please turn in either your hymnal (848) or in your Bible (pew-573) to Psalm 130 and read it with me.
This Psalm moves me. The writer is struggling with an unnamed iniquity which makes him or her feel distant and estranged from God. Beneath the plea for God’s forgiveness and the memory of that forgiveness is a crying need to be forgiven. This cry for forgiveness comes from a deep place in the soul. But forgiveness seems to be slow in the coming and the psalmist is reduced to spiritual beggary, waiting and hoping like someone suffering a long night of anxiety.
You will not be surprised to know that I am not perfect, that I am have blemish and spot upon my soul. Because of my own sins I know intimately the Psalmist’s cry. I know the weeping desire to be forgiven and to be healed so that I never betray God or those I love again. There are deficiencies of holiness in my life that make me a stranger to God, to others, and even to myself. And I want fast forgiveness, instant holiness, and immediate perfection. When I say, "I am sorry," I want to hear right now, "Oh, that's OK. I love you." But sometimes forgiveness, especially forgiveness for deep and repeated sins, doesn't come immediately. Sometimes, when we cry from our deepest parts, when we plead with God to hear our voice, the answer is very slow to come.
We have trouble waiting. Impatience is a national curse and a personal epidemic. If we want it then we want it now. We hate long lines and get irritated if someone ahead of us in the express aisle has more than their allotted number of items. We want fast credit, fast cars, fast computers, fast love, fast knowledge, fast solutions, fast wars, fast relief and fast forgiveness.
And if God, in our estimation, is sometimes slow to answer then how much slower to forgive are the ones we wound with our pride, anger, sarcasm, sexism, ageism, racism, homophobia and intolerance. And how much slower are we to forgive ourselves of the secret or not so secret failures of our love? Sometimes God and those we love make us stand in the long line with the new checker, who calls for several price checks, and whose register seems to be malfunctioning. And sometimes, maybe often, it is we who are slow to forgive others or ourselves and who create our own long line of waiting.
But the psalmist knows what we also know, sometimes waiting for the Lord, is the only and best thing we can do.
A few years back I was in a men’s Walk to Emmaus reunion group. One man had just gone through a messy divorce. He was a good man, in fact a very good man, but he was not a perfect man and he felt deeply his guilt in the dissolution of the marriage, the anger of his wife and the loss of his step-children.
He was, and is to this day, a deeply spiritual man. He has a passion for his faith as he strives to keep his heart open to Jesus, to understand and live a life in Christ. But at that time he was also a man who wanted healing much sooner than later. Patience, waiting for the Lord in those years, came to him with great difficulty.
One Tuesday night at our regular meeting he brought to our group this anonymous poem. It shares both his impatience and how God was healing him. It is a poem written in the same spirit as our psalmist wrote long years ago. The poem is entitled “Just Wait”
Desperately, helplessly, longingly, I cried.
Quietly, patiently, lovingly God replied.
I pled and I wept for a clue to my fate,
And the Master so gently said, “Child, you must wait!”
“‘Wait?’ you say, wait!” my indignant reply.
"Lord, I need answers, I need to know why!
Is your hand shortened? Or have you not heard?
By FAITH I have asked, and am claiming your Word.
“My future and all to which I can relate
Hangs in the balance, and you tell me to WAIT?
I'm needing a ‘yes,’ go-ahead sign,
Or even a 'no' to which I can resign.
“And Lord, you promised that if we believe
We need but to ask, and we shall receive.
And Lord, I've been asking, and this is my cry:
I’m weary of asking! I need a reply!”
Then quietly, softly, I learned of my fate
As my Master replied once again, “You must wait.”
So, I slumped in my chair, defeated and taut
And grumbled to God, “So, I'm waiting...for what?”
He seemed then to kneel and His eyes wept with mine,
And he tenderly said, “I could give you a sign.
I could shake the heavens, and darken the sun.
I could raise the dead, and cause mountains to run.
All you seek, I could give, and pleased you would be.
You would have what you want--but, you wouldn’t know ME.
“You’d not know the depth of my love for each saint;
You'd not know the power that I give to the faint;
You'd not learn to see through the clouds of despair;
You'd not learn to trust just by knowing I'm there;
You'd not know the joy of resting in me
When darkness and silence were all you could see.
“You'd never experience that fullness of love
As the peace of my Spirit descends like a dove;
You'd know that I give and I save...(for a start),
But you'd not know the depth of the beat of my heart.
“The glow of my comfort late into the night.
The faith that I give when you walk without sight,
The depth that's beyond getting just what you asked
Of an infinite God, who makes what you have LAST.
“You'd never know, should your pain quickly flee,
What it means that 'My grace is sufficient for thee.’
Yes, your dreams for your loved ones overnight would come true,
But, oh, the loss! If I lost what I'm doing in you!
"So, be silent, my child, and in time you will see
THAT THE GREATEST OF GIFTS IS TO GET TO KNOW ME.
And though oft may my answers seem terribly late,
My wisest of answers is still but to WAIT.” 1 Author unknown
Waiting does not have to be the empty time of desperate silence. It can be a fruitful path to God. John Wesley offers advice on how to effectively wait for God’s forgiving love to heal us. Waiting is not about doing nothing while twiddling the thumbs. Even when I go to the doctor and I sit in the room designated “the waiting room” I do something, read a book or magazine. Even in the grocery line or at the red light my mind occupies itself. Wesley said there are three things it is most helpful to do while waiting on the Lord:
- Do no harm. It is so tempting to drag others into our unforgiven disease and make them suffer with us. Don't do it.
- Practice what Wesley called the means of grace, the ways God has provided for
us to know servant love. There are five traditional means of grace:
- worship and communion, more than once a week if possible.
- prayer several times each day if not constantly
- study God's word in the Bible and by persons of faith
- abstain or fast from that which harms us
- have soul friends and meet with them weekly
- Do all the good you can. There is a little ditty supposedly penned by Wesley, but certainly inspired by Wesley, to help us understand the breath of this final waiting activity:
Do all the good you can, by all the means you can,
in all the ways you can, in all the places you can,
at all the times you can, to all the people you can,
as long as ever you can.
It is in this methodical waiting that Wesley believed God perfected us, moved us to a deep healing of the soul and transformed us from grace into grace, from glory into glory.
In waiting for God’s forgiving healing we can learn to let go of our striving need for immediate action; we can learn to let go our dissatisfaction with the present and to see the gifts of this moment. In waiting we can learn to enjoy our lives just as they are, broken as they are, as hard or as easy as they are. And in waiting we have the motivation and opportunity to study the word and to become confident that God does not waste a good wait, but is preparing us for new grace.
The prophet Isaiah says it this way:
Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,
They shall mount upon wings of eagles;
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.2 Isaiah 40:31
To know our iniquity, to be grieved by it, and to wait on God is to trust that God indeed loves us and has what is best for us in heart and mind. To wait on God is to know that God is a forgiving God and in the proper time heals us, saves by the best and shortest path. To wait on God is to renew our strength for the glories of each day.
The Psalmist with a heart felt cry teaches me about patience, how to wait with hope, and the even the benefits of not yet knowing. From the anguish of the soul, without an immediate answer, the Psalmist waits with both a memory of God’s unfailing forgiveness in the past and hope for the healing of the future.
Sometime back a friend who has much experience in waiting through an uncertain future sent me a prayer for all of us who are waiting. I think it is from Thomas Merton though it really doesn't matter, for it has the voice of God all over it whoever penned it. I close with this prayer:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.3 from Jerry Bechtle
Shalom and Amen