Waiting Is the Hardest Part
The last few years have led me to reflect a fair bit on waiting. We were waiting to see what was next, waiting to move, waiting for the end of challenging seasons, waiting for a new church to flourish. It seems that the life of faith is often the life of waiting. In all of this, David’s words have become something of a refrain for me—at once an encouragement and a challenge: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Ps 27:14).
Moses and Waiting.
Years ago, a retired pastor friend pointed me to the story of Moses, and how Moses had to wait. Rather than taking me to the book of Exodus, this pastor drew my attention to how Stephen speaks about Moses in Acts. In his speech, Stephen notes the murder Moses committed in defense of one of his fellow Israelites. Stephen explains about Moses:
He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand; but they did not understand (Acts 7:25).
Instead, they saw Moses as a threat: “who made you a ruler and judge over us?” (7:27). And then they go on to imply that they would turn him in if Moses did not leave them alone. Stephen reports that Moses fled the country, and then he picks up the account, “Now when forty years had passed. . .” (7:30).
Moses knew that “God was giving them salvation by his hand.” He had a sense that God was going to use him to deliver his people. As his life revealed, it was not enough to do God’s work. He was to do God’s work, God’s way, and in God’s timing. And so for forty years, he learned to wait before God would send him back to Egypt to deliver his people.
Reflecting on my own waiting.
Like Moses, I’m forty and need to learn to wait. I’m pretty sure that’s where the similarities end, and yet his story has proven a helpful reminder that God works through our waiting.
A significant time of waiting for me was searching for a place to serve in vocational ministry. It seemed like a good desire, but for years, I couldn’t get any traction. Ever so subtly during this time, I began replacing my desire for God with a desire for a place to serve him. While I am sure there were a number of ways the Lord used this search to mature me in Christ, it seems that at least one key thing I needed to recognize was that the goal of my life could never be purpose or a position, it needed to be God himself.
Toward the end of high school—around 2002 or 2003—I began to have some idea that I should pursue ministry. Certainly, by 2007 this calling seemed clearer as I enrolled in seminary that fall. By my first graduation from seminary in 2010, I was actively looking for places to serve. I spent the fall of 2010 in a church doing a preaching internship and applying to PhD programs. As I began my PhD work the next fall, I was still looking for a place of vocational ministry, but the few opportunities I had did not seem like they were good fits.
Boats waiting in harbor (San Francisco, 2010).
In retrospect, I see God’s grace in these closed doors. Dori and I had just been married in the summer of 2011, and it was much better for us and for our marriage to be on the receiving end of ministry. It was good for me not to have to balance the demands of ministry with learning how to be a husband (still a work in progress). We settled into a rhythm of Dori working full-time while I went to school full-time.
By the spring of 2014, I was finishing my coursework and the need for me to find a job—ministry or otherwise—became all the more real with our first child due in August of that year. Many months of looking and numerous jobs applied to all led to a single meaningful job offer. As it turns out, people are not to keen on having a young pastor with little to no experience and a half-finished doctorate. Who knew?
This opportunity seemed like a great fit, and it had tremendous potential. I went in thinking this would be a temporary stop as I wrote my dissertation, but in the back of my mind, there was the possibility that it could turn into a lifetime calling. I made it two years. It was a challenging environment for me, and the demanding hours strained me and my family—not to mention that I had little time to write my dissertation.
At the end of those two years, Dori and I decided that I shouldn’t renew my contract there and should focus on finishing school and then finding a position where I would be a better fit. For the summer and fall of 2016, I focused primarily on writing with a little job searching when I needed a break. By Thanksgiving, that balance had shifted, and I focused largely on looking for a place to serve.
Coming into 2017, my prospects seemed dim, and I was beginning to question the point of my decade in seminary. Why had God called me to seminary if he wasn’t going to let me use it? It was a battle to fight the bitterness that was creeping in. I had given myself to what I thought was a good and worthwhile endeavor—what is more, I felt called to it— and there was nothing to show for it. I could have pursued more lucrative career paths. Careers where my personality and skill set would have been seen as assets rather than liabilities. I felt like I had wasted a decade of my life and that I wasn’t going to be able to provide for my family in any meaningful way. I had a real sense that I was a failure. Whether because of my sin or my lack of skill and ability, it seemed that God had closed the door on me that I thought he had told me to walk through.
I had to ask myself: was there a point to a decade of seminary training if I were not to serve in ministry? Could I walk away with a PhD in church history and historical theology and be content with it only as a means to grow me in my personal faith?
Behind these questions, I eventually came to wrestle with a more fundamental issue: had my desire to serve God, and thereby have purpose in my life, come to supplant my desire for God himself?
I believe it had. In other words, I was using God as a means to an end. I was using him as means for my own personal fulfillment and happiness. The Lord was not the goal, but the purpose and meaning he could give my life was.
I had become the child who wants to see his grandparents in order to play with the toys they bring and not for the joy of spending time with them. I wanted God’s blessings and not God. I had wandered ever so slightly from the right path, but like taking a course a few degrees off on the compass, after many miles, I was far from where I needed to be.
Seeking God because he is God rather than for what he can give me continues to be a challenge. I do want purpose and meaning in my life, but more than these, I need to know the Creator and Redeemer of the world. Purpose in life is a great benefit to be gained from knowing God, but on its own, it makes a lousy god.
Before David ends Psalm 27 with a call to wait on the Lord, he declares, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (Ps 27:4). The one thing I need to wait on the Lord for is the Lord himself. Knowing and enjoying him are to be my true goals. Everyday, I need to heed anew the words of Christ: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you” (Matt 6:33). The order is of the utmost importance. God must come first.
God’s Perfect Timing.
Again and again, Scripture reminds us that God’s timing is perfect. Mark 5 recounts how Jesus heals Jairus’s daughter and the woman who had been sick for twelve years. I’m struck in this account by the urgency both Jairus and the ailing woman must have felt. Yet, Jesus is unhurried, patiently caring for those in need. Mark seems to encourage us to think about God’s timing in this account as he records that the woman had been bleeding for twelve years and that the girl was twelve years old. The length of one’s suffering and the youth of the other both speak to the urgency of their situations.
The scene begins with Jairus desperately coming to Jesus for help:
Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at his feet and implored him earnestly, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” And he went with him (Mk 5:22-24a).
Jesus hears the need and responds by going with this father to see his daughter. A large crowd presses around them to see what Jesus will do, but on the way they are stopped by a woman with her own desperation:
And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease (Mk 5:25-29).
Jesus knows something has happened, and he immediately stops the crowd. Even in the face of the dire situation with the young girl, he stops to address this woman who has been healed. Mark records,
And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” And he looked around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” (Mk 5:30-34).
This delay proves deadly, for as Jesus is speaking to this woman, news comes from Jairus’s house that his daughter has died. Yet, Jesus is undeterred. He turns to Jairus and assures him, “Do not fear, only believe” (Mk 5:36). Jesus continues on to the house:
And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James. They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was. Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” And immediately the girl got up and began walking (for she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat (Mk 5:37-43).
In the end, the delay with the woman who had been suffering for twelve years does not prevent Jesus from healing Jairus’s daughter. In fact, the delay enables Jesus to perform an even greater miracle: raising her from the dead. In turn, her resurrection points forward to Jesus’s own resurrection and to our hope of his one day raising us from the dead to everlasting life with him in the new creation.
Waiting and the Cross.
The woman waited for twelve years to be healed. Jairus waited through his daughter’s death for her to be raised. Moses waited forty years in the desert for God to use him. Time and again, God demonstrates to us that he works through the waiting for our good and for his glory.
When we are tempted to doubt God’s goodness in our waiting, when we wonder if he’s forgotten about us, we remember Christ Jesus’s own waiting. He became fully human, like us. He, the eternal and sovereign Son of God, entered into this world as an infant. He experienced life as we do, growing from an infant through childhood and into adulthood. For nearly three decades, he waited to begin his active public ministry. Even then, in a sense, his waiting continued. He endured the cross, crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34). He endured death and the grave, waiting three days to be raised victoriously. He did this all for us and for our salvation.
Now, as we wait, we wait for the fulfillment of Christ’s work in the new creation. We wait in the power of his Holy Spirit who grows patience in us. We wait, knowing that God our Father is working out all things according to the counsel of his will.
