I’m a wait-hater. Yeah, patience isn’t my gig. Grousing feels exponentially more cathartic. As a slow learner, I must relearn the same lessons repeatedly. I can feel the Almighty rolling His eyes at me.
Many of you are in the Lord-teach-me-to-wait-with-grace dinghy too, and I’m glad we’re rowing in unison, although we often don’t get very far upstream before capsizing over a submerged boulder.
So, let’s peruse our Bibles to see how long-suffering believers waited on the Lord:
Sarah waited 90 years for Yahweh to fulfill His promise that she would bear a child (Genesis 21), and her response to the news was snarky laughter. OK. I can relate to that.
Noah spent 100 years building an ark on dry land (Genesis 6-8), faithfully waiting for Yahweh’s vow of a catastrophic flood to come true. Then when it finally began to rain, he waited another 40 storm-tossed days, then sloshed around the prevailing waters for 150 more days while the waters receded. Bible scholars estimate the flood lasted a little over 12 months. Wait and wait and wait some more. Yep. Got it.
The progeny of Abraham waited nearly 400 years for Jehovah to fulfill His promise of giving them the pagan land of Canaan. The Israelites were not happy campers during their wait. Gripe. Complain. Grouse. I can relate to that too.
Hannah waited many years for the Lord to open her “closed” womb (1 Samuel 1) as she “wept bitterly” while endured cruel ridicule over her barrenness. With six miscarriages under my belt, I felt pretty closed too, as I waited to hold a baby that never came. Until 20 years later, when my beautiful, adopted grandbaby cuddled in my arms, looking uncannily like the brown-eyed girl in my recurrent dreams.
There are many examples of wait-haters in the scriptures who endured through the wilderness waiting periods, but because of one thing — hope — they found redemptive fulfillment on the other side. I find that as I read their stories and consider the challenges they went through, patience bubbles up inside my innards and fills me with hope too.
And I need as many of those hope-bubbles as I can get. Don’t you?
