What are we Waiting for?

We all have those days – days when we question God

We all have those days when what we know to be true is not making sense, and is not fitting into our lives.

We all have those days – when we blame God for all that is happening. When we wish we could punish God for what we are going through

Isaiah 40 was written for those days. It takes raw human pain and turns it into poetry.

The Isrealites are so mad, that they are ready literally to take God to court. To charge God with forgetting about them. To accuse God of having no idea of what is going on in their life, and worst of all not caring about them.

For them, it was being kicked out of their homeland, seeing their homes burned and destroyed, and being forced to live amongst people who don’t seem to understand God at all.

For us it could be living in a world where we see people losing their jobs, their homes, theor lifestyle. Not knowing when things will change, not knowing what things will change to. Or it could be a more personal struggle with health, with a relationship, with a dream.


We all have those days, when we wonder.

In those moments – Isaiah 40 starts with a rhetorical question – Have you not known, have you not heard, has it not been told to you from the very beginning.

That God is a God who is beyond our experience? God is bigger than anything good or bad that could happen to us. God looks at us and sees our lives like a grasshopper, small and inconsistent – yet caring and a part of God creation, thus important.

No matter what our religious background – we all know that beauty of God in the little things in life, the sunsets, the miracles, even on our questions. In good times, we are willing to praise and celebrate.

It is in the bad times that we are to remember that God is our refuge but also our strength. That if we trust in God – things will always change.

The serenity prayer
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

There is a second verse.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that you will make all things right if I surrender to your will; so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with you forever in the next. Amen

Serenity is always being reminded where our help comes from. It comes from God, from trusting that God will work things out. It is in trusting in God, not in the world in which we live.

Serenity is being willing to wait on God

The end of Isaiah ends with a promise that those who wait on God will run and not be faint, walk and nor be weary,

Our God will make everything right. If we are only willing to wait.

My colleagues this week got into an interesting conversation about what it means to wait – wait for God to make things better.

Unlike the olden days – waiting is a horrible thing. We don’t know how to do it – we don’t see the importance of doing it. It is easy for us to think that the way things are now, are the way things will always be.

One of them commented that Too often people interpret 'wait' as 'twiddle your thumbs'. I think this 'wait' needs to be a seeking and open time. It's an active wait, not sitting on you bum or sticking your head in the sand. For me, now waiting for my next direction, it means having my antennae out for signals as I try a wide range of things open to my participation. So, for me it includes prayer as a foundation but takes the form of being willing to risk.

Another said prayer-full waiting, and waiting with patience silent waiting, and waiting with song centered waiting, and waiting in a world full of distractions persistent waiting, and waiting with a foot tapping impatiently hands-open waiting, and waiting with an open book eyes-open waiting as the sun begins to rise, and waiting in daydreams sitting-still-as-a-cat waiting, and waiting with one's tail about to wagoff We are simply told, over and over, to wait for the Lord,and I personally think all waiting, every kind of waiting, is appropriate.


I would say that Waiting on God is being willing to live life as a prayer – a devotion to God.

It is understanding that the world we see now – is never God’s final word.
When they isrealites looked at the destruction of their world they could never see the restoration in store. When we look at the economy – today we cannot see recovery. I thought it interesting in a story of how the economy is shrinking and how people are losing their jobs- the it always expands and returns without us realizing it.
When we look at the world – we would never understand resurrection. When we hear of Jesus life and all that he taught us – there is nothing in the world that teaches us that his most important lesson is resurrection.

Nothing comes from waiting, everything comes from waiting on God.

In crisis – when we wait – God delivers us – we mount up with eagles wings
In busy times – when we wait – God delivers us – we run and do not grow weary.
In the routine times of lives when we wait – We will walk and not faint.

Waiting on the Lord is all that we have to do in life. Waiting of God us our lives, our beliefs, our hopes, our dreams, Our Christ.

Christ is the human example of what it means to wait on the lord and what difference it makes to us and to the world. Waiting is living the Jesus life in the world.

Phillip Yancy talks of living the Jesus life by practicing an ancient form of prayer called statio

Means being willing to stop one thing before beginning another. Rather than rushing from one taks to the next, take the time to pause and recognize the moment. Before talking on the phone – take the time to think about the person you are calling and the conversation you are about to have. After reading a book take the time to think about what you just read and its impact on you. Even after doing something as mundane as watching television – how did what you just saw contribute to your understanding of life? Reading the bible – ask the spirit for guidance. Do this often enough, and we start to see God in the midst of even the smallest details of our lives.

We learn that waiting is not a idle process of darkness, but a active process- where we see the miracle of life, the magic of God in our experiences.

The flying Roudellas, a group of trapeze artists explain that in a trapeze performance there is the flyer, the one who lets go and the catcher. And a very special relationship must exist between the two to be successful.

As the flyer flys high above the crowd, there is a point in which he or she must let go of the trapeze. But his job is not to reach for the catcher. The job is to let go and remain perfectly still in the air and to wait for the catcher to reach out and catch him or her.

I imagine that must be a very scary moment – to stay still in the air in perfect trust. But our lives are like that, those tough moments in our lives are like that – moments when we are still, serene enough to wait for God to pluck us from the circumstance and bring us to the other side.

But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. Amen.