A couple of years ago I was travelling to Sydney with my wife. I had a 9:15am flight and as I live about an hour out of Auckland I left home at 5:00am. At that time of the morning the commute is relatively easy. I was at the airport and through all the formalities by about 6:45am. So I was people watching, which I find really interesting and sometimes quite amusing. I had been thinking about what we can learn while we are in a waiting room. So I was looking around to see what I could observe.
As you know our thoughts are not always God’s thoughts and what I expected to discover was different from what God showed me. I was having a quiet time thinking about a passage from a book I was reading and matching it to scripture. I also had a few thoughts for this email, which was when God stepped in with a different dimension. My original thoughts were strongly steeped in my culture, both western and Christian, but God put a different spin on it altogether.
In our culture waiting is considered a waste…. Nike tells us we should just do it! That when we wait we don’t achieve, therefore it is a waste. Unfortunately when we are waiting with that perspective we don’t rest either, so little is gained. That was where I was going with my original thought. We as Christians can be quite passive and it seems sometimes we need to just get on with it! God however had another paradigm to add.
God is about being, not just doing. We need to learn to just be. He made you a human being not a human doing. We like the doing part because a lot of the time it makes us feel good. We are frightened by mystery and uncertainty. We like defined steps and say, “Just give me the formula”. When we are waiting it can be a place of boredom, agitation and even fear.
We are told we need to follow God, so we are looking for His leading. Sometimes this is not obvious, and we feel we are waiting for God. What would happen instead of waiting for God we were waiting with God? If we were waiting with God we would be with the lover of our soul, we could look forward to it, not dread it. It could be a time of solitude, silence and connection. A time of loving, reaffirming, dreaming (with God), strengthening and equipping. We would be an empowered people running on overflow of the presence of God, not deficit and depleted. We might even create time to wait with God!
Ponder on this:
What are you waiting for?
Do you have a “word” from God that is as yet unfulfilled?
Blessings
Paul Monahan