Wednesday, November 6, 2019
“But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.” (Romans 8:25, New Living Translation) 

                I am not a patient person. I don’t generally like waiting for anything.

                If I had been a test subject in the Stanford University Marshmallow Test I can tell you what I would have done. This is test in which children were offered a small reward, one marshmallow, to eat immediately or wait a mere 15 minutes and get two such rewards. The study revealed that children who waited, i.e. delayed gratification, were more likely to have better long-term life outcomes.

                Not me, boy! I’m stuffing that marshmallow down ASAP. Who knows when the next one might show up, if it all? Don’t trust those sneaky researchers one bit!

                Patiently waiting is not my style.

                “Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord.” (Psalm 27:14, NLT) I just as soon that the Lord would hurry up. The suspense is killing me. One day may be ten thousand to the Lord, but I just don’t have that kind of time.

                So when I was told yesterday that I might have to wait up to two years for my shoulder surgery, I was not a happy camper. (Peterborough has one of the highest rates for waiting times for replacement surgeries in the province.)  But a lot of stuff can happen in two years. I am not getting any younger. That’s a lot of tubes of Voltaren cream and taking Tylenol-3 pills. I’ve got places to be, things to do; grandchildren to wrestle with and play catch with. Two years – yikes!

                We live in a time of instant gratification. Some  us get impatient if our coffee takes more than 30 seconds to brew or our micro-waved food is longer than a few minutes in the making. We expect our parcels to arrive the next day after we have ordered them. Our messages to each other come in a flash of a second or two. When I hit start on my computer it had better be ready to go as quickly as possible. Most of us want life’s better things to happen sooner than later; we want it now, without delay and with as little inconvenience as it possibly can. We want results and we want them today, maybe right  this minute, if possible.

                I am not sure that Life always really needs to be lived in the fast lane, but sometimes it is really hard to move over to the far right, slower lane and enjoy some of the scenery or, at least, not be so stressed.

                Mind you, Paul is not writing about anything so mundane as a marshmallow or an Amazon parcel. He is reflecting on a time - and this is God’s version of time, not ours - in which, once and for all, Creation is freed from all futility, brokenness and decay. It will be a time of healing, restoration, recreation.  It is a time for the success of salivation and a new order of peace and justice. The mere hope for this time has remedial affects upon us in the present, even as we wait.

                Good things, often, need time to work out is own processes at its own pace so as to develop properly and in a healthy way.

“Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.” (Romans 8: 26-28 The Message)

                This attitude of waiting until it hurts is a part of faith, having the ultimate trust in the Love of God so that nothing can overwhelm us or pervert the good that will, one day, come our way.

                Life is good and we should live it to the fullness that God intends. But it also can be a waiting room, leading us on to another adventure of being and a new reality.

Wait for it!

Dale