Resisting the Microwave.

We live in a microwaved culture. We praise time management, we applaud efficiency, we encourage speediness. In doing so, we stifle the unopened buds of patience. I would argue that we need to be more of a crockpot culture, a culture that lets things breathe, cook, gain flavor, grow. We need to be able to arouse the senses to the aroma of coming promises and foretold hopes, like a pot roast simmering on low for hours. The beautiful things, the things long-awaited for, take longer than the 30 second express setting on a microwave; they require time, they require patience. If one tries to open a flower before its time, its beauty is coerced and pulled. True beauty is worth the wait. It's the tension of the now but not yet. This lesson of patience has been a lesson I've wrestled, resisted, and fought. But, ultimately, I have seen that things don't go our way when we want them to. The right time makes all the difference, and it's worth it, boy, is it worth it. Talking about waiting reminds me of someone in the Bible who had to wait for years for the very thing God promised him (read Genesis Chapters 15-16 and 21-22 if you need a refresher). God told Abraham that he would have a son and that his descendants would outnumber the stars, yet his wife was barren. They waited and waited and waited. In those years of waiting, Abraham and God became buds. The level of trust in God grew. They became close friends, and with that comes a deeper love for God. His love grew past the promise of Isaac. I think the season of waiting was very important, that the waiting gave birth to the promise that he desired. When we desire God and only God, that love and adoration surpasses the thing we are waiting for. Instead of loving God as a means to an end, God becomes the end. Abraham at 100 and Sarah at 90 were enabled by God to have a child. The promise had been fulfilled. But then...plot twist! God told Abraham to give up Isaac, and the crazy thing is Abraham was going to go through with it. Abraham was able to (probably begrudgingly) let go of Isaac when God called him to. It was painful, oh was it painful, but his trust and love for God was so great that he trusted Him to come through. God waited many years to fulfill the promise. I think that if God gave Abraham a son immediately after he told him, I don’t think that Abraham would have been as likely to give him up. Those years of waiting were vital because it allowed God to be reinstated as first in Abraham’s heart. He didn’t wait perfectly. He sinned along the way. He was by no means perfect. But, that long, barren, season of waiting is to this day a testament to God’s faithfulness and his provision. Are we able to lay everything at God's feet? Are we able to trust that the waiting is not for our harm but for our good?Henri Nouwen says it best. He says, "It is an active waiting in which we live the present moment to the full in order to find there the signs of the One we are waiting for."Longings fulfilled are truly a tree of life (Proverbs 13:12), but the tree sometimes has to grow, as the deeper the roots, the more beautiful and pure our longings become and the longer their fruit will last. If you are in a season of waiting, don’t view it as an inconvenience or as an obstacle to what you are hoping and longing for. God is wanting to do something in your heart in this time, something beyond understanding. Whether you are waiting to hear back from a job, waiting to date, waiting to travel, waiting to feel happy, waiting to move through a hard season, whatever the case, don’t rush it. Live into it and trust that the Lord will draw you closer to Himself in radical ways. Resist the microwaved culture and let your heart rest in the perfect, peaceful pace of Jesus.“To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond our imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God’s love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.”  Henri Nouwenwords by Abigail White and photo by Leah Van Otterloo