Active verses passive

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.