Tired of Waiting
A coworker shared a comment she made to another colleague who needed some help. “Don’t call Marilyn,” she said. “You know she hates last-minute.”
I laughed, knowing she had me pegged. While I often procrastinate on tasks I’d rather not do (hello, laundry), I will calculate to the minute how much time I need to complete them well and on time. But another person’s procrastination, especially when they expect me to make their last-minute decision my right-now priority, bothers me.
More than that, though, I hate waiting on other people. If I’m ready to go, intending to be somewhere, or preparing to move forward at a certain time, but I have to wait on someone else, I get visibly (and sometimes audibly) irritated. And more than once, I’ve allowed that frustration to boil over into less-than-Christ-like behavior.
And I can be impatient with God, too.
You see, I have dreams. Big, fat, juicy dreams. But when I look at the calendar and realize another week, another month, another year has gone by with no tangible evidence of those dreams coming to fruition, I get disappointed. I get angry. And sometimes, I give up. It’s in those moments, the ones when waiting on God seems futile or irrational, the ones when I question if I misheard Him, the ones when I believe that I’ve missed my chance, that I’m most tempted to fashion myself a new god.
“Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make us a god who will go before us…” (Exodus 32:1).
In Exodus 24:7, the people affirmed their commitment to God: “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient!” But when Moses did not come down from the mountain fast enough, when they had to wait longer than they anticipated, they turned. They decided to craft their own way forward.
Sometimes we rush ahead of God, plowing our own way through. Sometimes we calcify in place, assuming delay means denial. Sometimes we regress, heading back into the circumstances or to the people God delivered us from. We rely on our own understanding, sacrificing to the idols of self-sufficiency, defeatism, or resignation. We reframe the required waiting period into a call to figure things out for ourselves.
We are like the Hebrews waiting at the bottom of the mountain. We see evidence of God’s presence: the “consuming fire on the mountaintop” (Exodus 24:18). We still have our modern-day manna falling fresh every morning. But because we don’t have the one thing we think we should have by now, we construct our own meaning and take matters into our own hands.
But notice what God says to Moses about that same waiting period:
“They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them” (Exodus 32:8).
The people saw “delay,” but God saw them as “quickly turned aside.” God’s perspective on any matter is the truth. The forty days Moses was out of the people’s sight were not long according to God’s measure of time. And our understanding of delay is not either. If God told us to wait, it’s not because He is unsure. He knows exactly how much time it will take to bring things together the way He expects.
Friend, I pray that we learn to wait with patience and praise. Our God knows what He is doing. Instead of trying to figure things out, let’s look around and notice all the evidence that He has not left us. Let’s be grateful. Let’s trust that the same God who brought us to this waiting period is the same One who will carry us through it!
And if He says, “Wait!” let’s wait!
Memos from the Middle 