Its official!! I really don’t like waiting. Whether it be for a much longed for holiday to arrive, the end of lent (why on earth did I choose to give up chocolate after all!), or that unexpected roadworks queue – the one you didn’t know was there until you turned the corner and now wished, if only I’d gone the other way!

I guess that most of us are much the same. I suspect many are more patient than me. But generally, most of us simply want things to happen a little more quickly than they often do. 

Psalm 40 starts with what in one sense seem the unlikely words: ‘I waited patiently for the Lord’. I say unlikely, as I have read these words many times and only now do I find myself taking a pause and asking, ‘really’? Did King David, who wrote the psalm really wait patiently? After all, people were trying to kill him, that seems rather urgent to me.  

The truth is, it is easier to say ‘I waited patiently’ when the pressure is off – when looking back; but so much harder when all around seems to be going wrong and God doesn’t seem to be listening.

The same psalm ends with the words ‘O my God, do not delay’. Perhaps in these words there is the more human reality; the earnest cry to God to reach down and rescue us from our troubles. Lord, please come quickly, as this is simply too hard to bear. 

Job of course is one of the most painful demonstrations of waiting; hence the phase ‘the patience of Job’. It is almost too awful to even start to contemplate what difficulty and pain he went through to earn that accolade. 

And then there is Anna and Simeon, who greet the infant Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem; witnessing the coming to pass of promises made centuries before. These to dear faithful believers, each patiently waiting for decades, believing that something better was coming. Something worth waiting for.

All these people, and more, waited patiently. Yet I suspect that did not mean that they constantly walked around in a tranquil meditative-like haze of calm acceptance. Their waiting was sometimes painful; sometime surrounded with danger; or simply the day-to-day challenge of needing to keep going, when there is no clear sign when things are going to change.

Perhaps this is the essence of how David was able, with integrity, to say he had ‘waited patiently’. David the man who would agonise and cry out to God. Such patience in waiting is perhaps not so much a sublime state of detached calm, but rather an honest trust that God will indeed come through for me; a faithfulness in the waiting, even when it really hurts, even when an honest critique of our waiting is peppered, as it often is, with doubts fears, and anxieties. This is perhaps where we can say, ‘I waited patiently for the Lord’; it’s because waiting patiently for the Lord is framed in the heartfelt cry, ‘O my God, do not delay’. Waiting patiently means we’ve grappled with the difficulty, not the ease; it means we have held on faithfully, sometimes even when every bone in our body is saying give up.

God did not let down Job, David, Anna or Simeon. He is a faithful God, for whom it is really worth waiting for patiently. A God who will not let us down when we humbly cry out to him. 

A Prayer:

Father God. You are the God who is both patient with me, and who also helps me in my impatience.
Help me to trust your promised never to leave nor forsake me.
Let your perfect will be done in my life, and the lives of those I bring before you now. 
In the loving name of Jesus. Amen.