God’s
timing is one of the most frustrating, misunderstood blessings in disguise that
we often encounter. We live in such an instant gratification world, that the
term long-suffering is a mystery. Like most of you, I absolutely hate waiting on
things. I am sometimes so impatient that I have even taken things out of the
microwave (yeah, that machine that speeds up the cooking process) before they
are ready. When that happens, the process is actually slowed down. Rather than
2 more minutes of cooking, it turns into 2 ½ or 3 more minutes because of my
lack of patience.
My two
oldest daughters (2 ½ and 5 years old) live in a phase of slowing down the
process. My 2-year-old insists that she can do everything herself. Whether it’s
putting on clothes or buckling her car seat, she has to do it. Most of the time
I don’t really mind, however, it seems like her biggest tantrums always happen
when she wants to do something herself but I know she can’t. It doesn’t matter
how logical my reasoning is, in her 2-year-old mind she knows how to do it. Of course,
when I let her go ahead and try, it turns into a tantrum because she can’t do
it. By the time I settle her down, 15 minutes have passed for a 30 second task.
My 5-year-old is the exact same way. She is little miss independent right now
and loves to help cook. She wants to dump ingredients and stir them together. At
one point, she was helping her dad cook one of his favorite things and decided
to jump ahead and not wait for instructions. She ended up dumping half a bag of
powdered sugar into the bowl. Thankfully, he was able to get most of it out and
it didn’t ruin the whole recipe, but it added about 10 minutes to the process.
If she would have just been patient, they could have eaten their snack a lot
sooner.
I think we so often do the same
thing in our walk with God. We don’t want to wait on his timing so, like my 2-year-old,
we insist on doing it ourselves. We try to force on the pants when both our
legs are in the same hole, then wonder why we get so frustrated. Or maybe like
my oldest daughter, we are so anxious to get to the end result, we jump ahead
and start adding our own ingredients before we know if those ingredients are
even in the recipe. When we do that, God not only needs to help us, but he must
first undo all the damage we created in the process of doing it ourselves. I struggle
so much with not jumping ahead of God’s plan. When I feel called in a certain
direction, I want to run and not walk. Yet, we are not always asked to run.
Sometimes we are told to wait.
After Jesus was resurrected, He
told his disciples to wait before they went out to preach. I’m sure that they
were fired up and ready to go out and save the world, but they had to wait. “And while staying with them He ordered
them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father,
which, He said, ‘you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but
you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’”
Acts 1:4-5 ESV. They needed the power of the Holy Spirit before they could be
truly effective ministers to the nations.
Perhaps in our time of waiting, God
is empowering us for the thing that he is calling us to do. Rather than trying
to force the hand of God and slowing down the process, maybe it’s time to wait
and let Him show us day by day and step by step what we are supposed to do.
