When someone tells you or when something requires you to
wait it tends to be natural to feel like you are doing nothing. Being out on
hold on the phone feels like a waste of time and we can so quickly think of
better things we could be doing with are time, like actually doing something.
This summer as I have been in the middle of a great many
things and in what feels like limbo as I transition I have often felt like I
wasn’t doing much. Here I am back living at home working on raising support. To
start with how do you even do that? It wasn’t something I was used too; it
wasn’t like picking corn for three hours and being paid a wage for it. It is
something very different. It was difficult to know what to do while at the same
time recognizing that in the large scheme of things there is nothing I can do.
It isn’t and it will never be up to me.
As a struggled trying to figure out what I was able to do I
kept running into words like hope, trust, be still, wait. Words that frustrated
me, that seemed to be telling me that my role was to be passive not active. Yet
as I read through the words of Psalm 37:5-7 I was amazed by the clearness and
the assurance found in it. “Commit
your ways to the Lord, trust in Him and He will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the
noonday. Be still before the Lord
and wait patiently for Him” Notice
the words it uses to instruct us, commit, trust, be still and wait. To me those
do not sound like action words, they sounded like defeat or surrender words, they
sounded passive. But what did sound active was what God would do, he will act
and bring. How come my role is to just commit, trust, be still, sit back wait
and do nothing?
There is an unwillingness in me to do these things and truth
be told it is a lot more work to truly commit and trust, to wait, hope and be
still waiting for Him to work. Choosing each day to commit your way to God, to
trust Him without doubting and choosing to be still rather than anxious waiting
expectantly for Him to move is not something that say and choose quick before
your feet hit the floor in the morning.
It is a daily long process, a never ending action of choosing how your
are going to be and what you choose to do in the midst of the waiting and
trusting.
Practically I find it hard to understand, to explain to
myself or to others mostly because it isn’t a formula. How simple it would be
if it was, just a nicely as 2+2=4, commit + trusting = means fill in the blank. But it’s not that way
is it. There is not formula on how to trust without doubting or to wait
patiently. What there is though is an incredible peace that comes when it is
being chosen and lived out. There is an absence of fear, concern and worry when
you choose to life in the light of the power of a God that is far greater than
anything you could do.
