As we wait. May 11

Today, I read David's pleading words to God, "Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror, while you, O Lord--how long?

For much of my childhood I would hear in great abundance about the number of psalms that praise God for his glory and righteousness and grace. That's what I knew the psalms to be. But one particularly difficult summer in college I turned to the psalms for solace and discovered, to my surprise, that many of the psalms beg for God's mercy, plead for protection, and expose fear and frustration.  And they reveal the vulnerability we confront when we come face to face with our inability to see the future.

A number of David's psalms were written in the midst of what, for David, was a great unknown. Wandering in the wilderness, running from Saul, David had no idea how long he would be stuck out there hiding and fighting. Scholars have estimated David drifted around in the mediterranean wilderness for fifteen to twenty years. Anointed by a prophet as a youth, appointed musician to the king, and defeater of Goliath and the Philistines, David was run out of town and spent years without a place to call home. Undoubtedly, it must have felt like it was never-ending. His psalms give us a glimpse into just how hard it must have been to wait without end.

Waiting is a necessity of building maturity, but its clash with human nature makes it frustrating and its entirely foreign relationship with American culture makes it maddening. Whether we're waiting to get better from an illness, waiting for our child or brother or sister to get a clue, waiting for an important phone call, or waiting for our life to start, the process (and it is a constant process) can make us question our very existence.  Waiting is frustrating, though, not primarily because of the delay in getting what you want. It is frustrating precisely because we are always aware of the lingering possibility and fear that we could be waiting forever.

The piece of the process that makes us (or at least me) want to, at times, rip our hair out is that foggy state of limbo--that blind walk through the wilderness with no map to guide us.  I wonder if David ever questioned his call to be king, if he had moments where he thought maybe he had it wrong. As years continued to pass by and he kept trudging around the untamed land, day after day, week after week, year after year, his vision must have blurred now and then.

But it turns out there is a lot of waiting in the Bible. Paul hoped for years to go to Rome, never knowing if he would finally make it.  Moses kept throwing plagues at Pharaoh and Pharaoh continually denied the Israelites their freedom.  (It turns out plagues only have a ten percent success rate in delivering freedom.) The widow waited for her imminent death before Elijah showed up in her life and brought God with him, or maybe I should say, before God showed up and brought Elijah.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. "...while you, O Lord--how long?"

When circumstances are beyond our control, we simply wait. We wait for our health to come back to us in the midst of sickness.  We wait for our finances to catch up with our bills as we diligently try to control our budget. We wait for a good job to show up in our seemingly endless search. We wait for miracles.

Some time ago I read the quote, "Everything will be all right in the end.  If it's not all right, it's not the end." David's story is great evidence of that.  Of course, David didn't have a fairy tale ending. He slept with another man's wife, killed that man who had been very loyal to him in order to cover his own ass when consequences of his bad choice spiraled out of his control, and his son, Absalom, ran him out of town.  But the story of his wilderness wanderings did come to a close and after years of wondering if Saul was ever going to die, David finally became king.

In our fast-paced, technology driven culture, our theology around waiting is poor at best. For the past year I have been waiting for my life.  I'm waiting to have my independence back, waiting for a job that I'm passionate about and that gives me good experience while paying me enough to live and cover all my bills every month. In the meantime, I work a job I have no passion for, am deferring a number of student loans, and I live with my parents in a very tiny house.  It's less than perfect, to understate it, and I find myself constantly wondering what God is doing and where God is.  As I think about that I realize just how fickle my faith is. God is great when I love my life but when the fog roles in and I can't see where I'm going, I think maybe I don't really understand God at all.  And then I see the inconsistency and wonder just what do I base my faith on, anyway?  I want to have that blind faith that fully trusts no matter what my circumstances are.

But then I read the psalms and I see David ask the same questions I want to ask. If David, who is described as a man after God's own heart, can ask those questions, maybe I can, too. Maybe wondering what is going on is part of faith and part of growing.  What I learn from David is this is not where faith ends.  David's pleas always seem to be followed by a note of recognition of God's faithfulness and holiness.  Psalm ten begins with, "Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" But in verse fourteen, a shift comes with, 'But you see! Indeed you note trouble and grief.'

Waiting is trying to our patience, to our spirit, to our faith.  For those of us who desire that heart of God, we tend to believe even in endless waiting we will ideally never question what is going on with God.  But what if that's wrong? Maybe for me, for us all, the object in faith is not reaching a point where we have no more confusion and questions.  Maybe it's having the questions but making sure we don't stop in the middle.  Maybe the mission is simply to follow the questions through to the other end of the psalm.