Day 2774 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Lamentations 3:26 NIV

Patience is arguably one of the hardest virtues for us humans. We live in this drive-thru, microwave, smartphone world where we can get whatever we're looking for and do whatever we're trying to do almost immediately. We can hop on Google and find the answer to any question we may be pondering. We can turn on the TV and be suddenly overwhelmed with all the mind-numbing entertainment our consuming selves could possibly desire. We can find countless ways to make life quicker, and we love it!

We're so used to having everything in an instant that if something takes a little time, we simply start assuming that it's not worth it. Why wait for something when we can probably find something relatively similar that we can have a lot faster? We've simply gotten it in our minds that "time is money", and we all know how badly enslaved this world is to money, so our time is seen in basically the same light. We can't waste it. We can't sit around being patient. We have to go, run, hurry up so we can keep up and not fall behind in this rat-race of a society.

Problem is that faith doesn't work like that. It doesn't work at all like that. In fact, as we've been discussing, faith basically exists to run counter to anything we've ever experienced before. It leads us up mountains that require us to put in extreme effort to keep going. It takes us down into valleys that make us wonder if there's a bottom as things keep going downhill. It forces us to leave behind every pre-conceived notion and cut loose every selfish preference as we learn an entirely new way to live.

And one of the very first lessons we learn about our faith is that God does things in His own timing and ours is rarely if ever considered. He has a plan that He simply isn't willing to compromise just to appease our desire for all of this to speed up. While we're buys focusing on rushing to the finish line, He's up there plotting every step we take to ensure that this path leads not only where He wants it to go, but that it's filled with all the things that it needs to be filled with along the way.

And I think that's honestly one of our biggest problems when it comes to patience. In our minds, we've already got this all figured out. We know what we want, where to find it, and the shortest path to get there. Or at least we think we do. Yet again, to me at least, that's one of the biggest lessons our faith teaches us. It teaches us that we're not right as much as we think we are. We don't actually have it all figured out. We don't know what we need because we're too easily blinded by what we want. We don't know the best path to take because we'd always choose ease and comfort and speed over purpose and persistence and patience.

That's why we need to learn to wait on God. Sure, we'd love nothing more than to simply crash through life and end up at the finish line relatively unscathed so that we can just go ahead and get to enjoying the peace of Heaven. But while we can find our weird little ways to make that seem logical, what we really need is the opportunity to learn what Heaven is, why it's there, and what it takes to enter those gates. We need these lives to be as long as they are so that we can discover just how much we've gotten wrong and have some time to learn His ways while forgetting our own.

It is good for us to go through seasons of waiting because they teach us to rely on God, to trust in His plans, to have faith in His will and the timing with which it's being revealed. Patience helps us get a better handle on the brevity of life and learn to appreciate the opportunity to not be in control for once. Now, in this land of selfishness and arrogance, control is definitely another issue that we grapple with. But again, patience helps us learn to see things differently, and maybe even make some much needed changes.

I think that's what we tend to miss while we're complaining about how long God's plans seem to take. We see time waiting as time wasted. We think of it as nothing but sitting around doing nothing and failing to make the most of every second of the day. But in reality, having to slow down affords us the opportunity to think, to reconsider, to discover things that we would have likely never noticed in our normal hastening through life.

Rushing anything opens the door for making mistakes. We cut corners, make concessions, and find a gross willingness to not do our best. Good enough will always suffice when we're in a hurry. And that's yet another lesson we learn in the waiting that our faith often requires. We learn that good enough is not good enough. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades. When it comes to our salvation, we should want more than just hoping we've gotten close to knowing Christ!

Friends, despising the seasons of waiting and slowness and patience and calmness in life is truly a tragedy. Those days when it doesn't seem that God's doing anything are our chance to focus in and grow our trust that He is actually at work. We're so used to always having something going on and getting this immediate feedback that points to progression that we think God's simply asleep at the wheel. But the truth is that if He's making us slow down and wait, He's doing something truly important.

He's helping us remember that this is all His plan that will unfold in His timing in order to fulfill His will that leads us to His promise. It's all about and for and from and heading toward Him!

We've been talking a lot about the desert and how closely it matches this life of faith that we're living and learning. On the surface, it seems barren, empty, void of anything that we need or want. But it's in the desert that we learn to lean on God. Waiting is no different. To us, it just seems pointless because we look around us and see the world rushing on ahead and immediately feel this fear of falling behind. But in reality, that's exactly what we need and God knows that far better than we ever will!

He knows that we need to pull back from running with the herd. He knows we need to slow down and break away from trying to keep up with all the nonsense this world is chasing after. He knows that the wide path that so many are racing down leads to a horrifying dead-end, and He simply wants us to take a different path that leads to something far better.

Folks, waiting is not at all a bad thing. In fact, it may be one of the very best things for us because it gives us time to listen, to think, to learn, to focus in on what God's doing and what He's trying to tell us. So often we just run right by Him and still have the audacity to say that He's not speaking. It's pretty hard to hear someone when you keep running away from them!

If God has you waiting, don't get frustrated or angry or give in to this lie that you're missing out on whatever the rest of the world is in such a hurry to get. He has something better for us, and we need to slow down and wait patiently so that we can learn to focus on His will rather than our own. This is an awfully beautiful journey filled with so many incredible blessings and experiences for us to enjoy. If we only knew how much we had to fix and learn and change, we'd be far more willing to stop and smell the roses and take a little more time to wait patiently for the Lord.

Sure, the rest of the world is in a big hurry to get where they’re going. But the Bible tells us quite plainly where this world is heading, and we shouldn’t want any part of it. So maybe slowing down and learning how to live a life not so focused on chasing after the world is exactly what leads us deeper into communion with Christ. And in that slower, more patient life of waiting on the Lord, we might just have a little more time to shake a little more of this vile place off our feet and out of our heart.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold