Sunday, October 26, 2014

waiting

            I opened my door to find a four year old boy raising his hand to knock.
            “What do you need, J—?”
            “I wa a cooie,” he replied, leaving out a few consonants.
            “A cookie?  No, I can’t give you one, sweetie.  Did your mom come today?”
            “No,” he said and glanced at the ground.
I sighed and changed the subject.
            He’s been waiting for his mom to come for longer than any four year old boy should have to wait.  He wants a good thing—what could be better than a young boy seeing his loving mother?—but right now it’s being denied him.  He doesn’t know why.  I don’t know why.  It’s so hard to watch him wait.
            I, too, am waiting for things.  I have desires tucked deep inside my heart, good ones that I remember daily and don’t see fulfilled.  I don’t know why.  Others around me don’t know why.  It’s so hard to wait.
Neither of us knows how long.  Will his mother come this week?  Will I get what I want this month?  This week passes.  This month passes.  And nothing.  And we wonder why.
But as I review my ponderings, I’ve found them to be a source of deeper discontentment.  If I only peppers my thoughts.  My future becomes solely dependent upon my actions; I am the master of my fate.  But as I change things, set up the chain of events correctly on my end and what I want still doesn’t come around, I’m left in despair.  I come to the realization that I can’t make myself happy.  And if I can’t make myself happy, what then?
I’m forced to learn contentment or wallow in misery.  I can’t control my circumstances, but I can control my reactions.
Years ago, I heard someone say, “The point of our trials is not for us to understand why, but rather for us to be made more like Christ.”  All the time I ask why, I’m looking for the answers in the wrong places.  My “why” is not searching for the purpose, but the problem.  My question assumes a flaw, not a function.  And that tiny speck of perspective, it multiplies and grows until it is all I can see.  God’s goodness disappears as I close my eyes to convince myself that there is only darkness.  Sure, there’s only darkness, because that’s all I’ve chosen to see.
When I finally tire of my created darkness, I peek out onto the world.  Light.  The first sign of God’s goodness.  My trials have a purpose: my joy.  What could be better than being like Christ, the incarnation of God himself?
Although I now see the light, I don’t see the future clearly.  That’s why I turn my head over my shoulder.  I know what I’ve been through.  I have stories of God’s faithfulness.  And if I’m too tired to recount them, others have stories too.  The centuries are bursting with them.  So I listen to them over and over again.  I whisper them to myself as I fall asleep.  I draw them in my notebook.  If my God is the definition of faithfulness and I have overflowing proof of the fact, I can find no reason to declare him guilty.  I cannot rationally review the evidence, the fingerprints and the proof that declare my God faithful and me unfaithful, and slam my mallet and yell, “Guilty!  God you are guilty of unfaithfulness.  Maybe you haven’t been unfaithful yet, but you will be.  I just know it.  Lock him up.”  To do so is to attempt to trap God, force him to bribe me to let him go.  When I sew the evidence into my day, scribble it on the moments with permanent marker, I get caught in my own trap and my fraud can’t help but whither.
I’m still waiting.  Little J— is still waiting.  Who knows how long we’ll wait?  We may spend the rest of our lives waiting.  But if we wait with a purpose in view instead of a problem, we will find the pain of waiting grow paler as we reap the product of waiting with a purpose: joy as the purpose is fulfilled and we are made more like Christ.

(No, I don't believe in motivational photos.  I'm just tired of my link thumbnail being jalapeno peppers.)

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