I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry.

Psalm 40:1

[This is a condensed version of a sermon I preached in March. We just thought we were learning to wait back then.]

In the Bible, waiting and hope go together. Over and over again, those who have hope wait patiently on the Lord. Most of us modern folks are not good at waiting. We have managed to create a world in which we get almost everything we want instantaneously. Still, not everything in life comes quickly.

I remember my first few months here in Sugar Land waiting for Hurricane Harvey to make land fall. First, we waited for the hurricane to hit, the literal quiet before the storm. With everything shut down and boarded up there wasn’t anything to do but stay at home and hang out. Then the winds hit. Because the eye of the storm was further south, the winds here weren’t that bad, until the tornadoes started up. Nobody warned us about the tornadoes. All night long our phones buzzed with warnings that tornadoes were headed our way. From the little red boxes on the map it looked as if they were right on top of us. We moved our waiting from the kitchen table to the half-bath, all four of us huddled on the floor. That night seemed to stretch out forever. What could we do but wait?

When morning came, it felt like we had escaped the worst of it, but there still wasn’t much to do but watch the rain fall-down. It rained and rained and rained. The waters rose and rose and rose. We tried to leave, but didn’t make it far. Just up the road to Katy. Where we were taken in by a friend’s sister. Three families in one house with nothing to do but wait.

When we finally got back home, back to the church, back to work, I realized the waiting hadn’t stopped. All the plans we’d made for the church up to that point had to take a back seat to the new task of helping people with recovery. If you remember that moment, none of us worried about that waiting one bit. The waiting on each other was the work we were most called to do.

This virus makes Hurricane Harvey seem like a high speed disaster. We have waited and waited and wait still. With the Psalmist we call out to God to deliver us. We trust that he will. In the meantime, we wait.

We trust that even in the waiting, God is at work in our lives. Think of a butterfly in a chrysalis. For a season, the caterpillar must wait. That doesn’t mean nothing is happening. It isn’t eating or crawling or doing any of the normal things caterpillars do, but something is being done to the caterpillar. Something transformative. Something redemptive and new.

When we find ourselves in a season of waiting, we can embrace the potential by keeping ourselves open to the transformative work of God in our lives and in our word. We must remember that waiting isn’t a sign that God is out to lunch. Waiting isn’t evidence that God has forgotten us. To the contrary, our waiting may mean we find ourselves right in the middle of God’s plans, because God’s plans include seasons when you and I must simply wait on him. When we wait, God does some of his best work on our soul.

Embracing the potential of waiting doesn’t mean that we celebrate our waiting or even understand what’s happening? Does the caterpillar understand what’s happening to it? I don’t know. We may not understand why we must wait, or even more so, why we must endure suffering as we wait, but we cannot deny that God can use seasons of trial for his glory and our good.

Israel waited for her Messiah.

Mary, like every mother, waited for her child.

We wait for Christ to deliver us.

We wait for Christ to come again.

---

Father, you are infinitely patient with us. Teach us to be patient with you. You are not slow in keeping your promises nor absent from us while we wait. We trust that in our waiting on you, your work continues even if it’s hard to see. Amen.

---