“But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” – Romans 8:25
Peanut is about the most impatient creature I have ever met. Pretty soon after we started running, she learned the word run. So if I told her we were going on a run, she had no patience for the time it took me to change, stretch, do my hair, and put shoes on. I solved the problem for a bit by waiting to tell her about the run until I was all ready to go. But it wasn’t long until she learned which pants were my running pants. So I started stretching and doing my hair first, and waiting until the end to change. But now she’s at the point where she just knows whether or not we’re running before I even start anything. I’m not sure how, but she just knows.
And so for the ten minutes or so it takes me to do all my pre-running tasks, she whines. She jumps at me. She runs to the door and back. She makes no effort to hide the fact that she thinks I am so slow.
And sometimes I’ve said to her, “Peanut! It’s ten minutes! Stop being so impatient!”
At one point, I was dealing with a few big could-be possibilities in my life. I was wondering what God had in store for me and when the things I was expecting would happen. And although I wasn’t literally running around frantically, my thoughts were doing all the same things Peanut does when she is ready to run.
That ten minutes to Peanut probably feels like a lot longer than it feels to me. (Perhaps 70 minutes?) Likewise, a few days, a few months, a few years is a blip on the radar for God…yet it can feel like such a long wait!
At the same time as all this was going on, I was working on memorizing Psalm 40. I often reminded myself of verse 1, “I waited patiently for the Lord.” But another verse really struck me was verse 5: “The things you have planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare.” God has so many great things planned for me and you. Far better than a run around the neighborhood. We can have great hope in these things—but we wait for them patiently.
On a scale of 1-10, how patient are you and why?
No comments:
Post a Comment