Terminal Impatience
Eight Billion Prima Donnas
It was amazing and sometimes alarming when the Holy Spirit started working His magic in me. I found myself wondering around with a shiny new attitude and a entirely new outlook. Before I knew it I had love, joy, and a side helping of peace to go along with it……….that was before I ran into that concrete-like fruit called patience! Love, joy, and peace were just sort of dropped into me but patience…….well, it’s been years and we’re still working on that one! I know it’s important because impatience is terminal to my other fruits. Hardly anything can steal my joy and peace like frustration at having to wait.
Tell the truth, can you name one naturally patient person in your life? That one person who doesn't mind waiting, even if they’re in a hurry? Well, all I can say is good for them. They are an odd duck in today’s pond. If they could bottle it, I’d be at the head of the line to buy it. Patience has never been my cup of tea. My mother told me to never, ever pray for patience because your prayer might be answered. I didn’t and it wasn’t.
Of course, my mother was trying to help. She presumed that the only way for me to acquire patience was to be forced to wait on something, or in my case, several something’s, and that most likely wasn’t going to be very pleasant. It must run in the family because my sister absolutely hates to wait or be late, or maybe I should say she insists on being early. We go to church together and if church starts at nine then she needs to be seated and ready at eight forty five. And that means being in the parking lot at eight thirty. You're never going to have to wait for my sister.
Don’t you sometimes wish God was like that? Always early.
Time is a weird thing with God. There are a thousand theories but it’s generally believed that God must exist outside of time. That He is able to see the end and the beginning simultaneously. I’m not sure about all that but I know for a fact that His clock is a lot different than mine. And if you look through the Bible carefully you’ll notice that God doesn’t box himself in with exact dates or times. In other words, He makes a lot of promises to us about what He will do, but rarely says when He will do them. If that brings you a sense of dread like it does me then I’ve bad news for you…..your wait is going to be longer than most. Impatience is a hindrance to the growth of your faith and anything that hinders your faith God will remove with the conviction of a surgeon digging for cancer cells.
But don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, it seems like every time I turn around my patience is being tested. I’ve struggled mightily to get on God’s schedule, and although I’m not completely there yet, I made some progress in prison. Everything in prison happened at a snail's pace. It didn’t matter what it was, court filings to commissary trips to doctors visits, everything took forever. Even though I could look at my predicament and see how God was stretching my faith, it still sucked. Whatever I was hoping and praying for seemed to take forever and go through a comical number of delays. For the longest time God didn’t do early with me and to this day we have wildly different definitions of it. But somewhere in all the whining and praying God placed a little seed of patience inside me. In this life I may never possess that terribly elusive trait in any great quantity, but it doesn’t seem as far out of my grasp as it once was.
Lately it’s occurred to me that maybe I should cut Him some slack about the waiting. I know He’s God and everything, but imagine the amount of choreographing it must take to answer believer prayers in today's world. First, He’s got eight billion prima donnas running around down here, all enjoying free will. Factor in that He primarily uses normal things rather than miracles to answer prayers. Not saying He couldn’t drop a bag of cash in your living room when you need money, but typically you would get something like a surprise bonus at work. Imagine the incredibly complicated machinations He must embrace since He seems determined to work through human beings. Especially when only a pitiful few are willing to obey His voice. And when those prayers are answered because someone knew someone else who knew someone else and eventually someone down the line helped us, we say, “it’s such a small world” when in truth, He’s just a big God. But even He has trouble getting people to act right. It’s like herding cats.
I also try to remember that the ultimate goal is to make me more like Jesus, so I ask myself, “How is this waiting doing that?” Honestly, it’s embarrassing to contemplate since Jesus took patience to a whole new level. It’s one thing to wait on God to find you a new job or drop you that bag of cash, but in the years before His crucifixion there is little doubt that Jesus walked by scores of people hanging on crosses. Mass crucifictions were an especially common Roman practice in the Holy Land during Jesus’s time on earth. Imagine watching nails being driven into people’s wrists and ankles with the knowledge that you would one day share the same fate. Knowing Him, I’m sure He was filled with compassion and love for those poor people. But he wouldn’t have been human and scripture makes it clear that the wait for His own crucifixion weighed on Him. As the years passed and the time drew nearer, the anxiety of it all must have ratcheted up tremendously. To the point that He had to be terribly ready to get it over with and move on! But He didn’t, He patiently chose to wait on God’s timing. I can’t imagine…..
It’s hard to wait but try to remember…..God’s got a plan and it’s better than yours!
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