22. How Do I Do This Waiting Stuff?
22
How Do I Do This Waiting Stuff?
One discipline of the spiritual life to which many of us find it most difficult to submit is that of waiting. No other discipline reveals more about the quality of our faith than that one. Sometimes we are subject to criticism from others because we seem to be doing nothing. When waiting is an act of obedience it is of course an invisible one. Only the One waited on sees it for what it is, but we must resist the temptation to defend and explain to our critics, and simply go on trusting.
True waiting on God is not “doing nothing.” Psalm 37 lists the principal elements of this hidden activity, a perfect formula for peace of mind (parentheses not divinely inspired, merely mine):
Trust in the Lord and do good.
Dwell in the land (make your home, settle down, be at peace where God puts you).
Delight in the Lord (make the Lord your only joy) and He will give you what your heart desires.
Commit your life to the Lord.
Trust in Him and He will act.
Be quiet before the Lord.
Wait patiently for Him, not worrying about others.1
Waiting patiently is almost impossible unless we also are learning at the same time to find joy in the Lord, commit everything to Him, trust Him, and be quiet. My friend Liz recognized her need to learn the steps. She writes:
I would love to ask you the “how to’s” of this whole daily exercise of faith. Being single. But I hope that my hoping and wrestling in this “love arena” will be won out WITH HIM on the curve of daily life. The rigors of the battle of learning these steps of faith will suffice more than a catalogue of answers.
It seems much too easy for me to sit down and write out some casual note that screams “How do I do this waiting stuff?” when God has set up an order of commands, laws, guidelines that mark my path quite clearly. . . . PRAYER is the greatest “reasoning” I could request.
I pray for her and for the multitudes like her who struggle to wait. I think of the story told by Amy Carmichael in her first year of missionary work in Japan. She and a missionary couple were held up on a journey because of a boat which did not arrive or did not leave—I forget which. Not just hours but days went by, and the young missionary began to fret because of the time lost and the consequences to others who counted on them. The older missionary said calmly, “God knows all about the boats.” It became a maxim of faith for the rest of her life.
Many times in my life God has asked me to wait when I wanted to move forward. He has kept me in the dark when I asked for light. To my pleas for guidance His answer has often been Sit still, My daughter. I like to see progress. I look for evidence that God is at least doing something. If the Shepherd leads us beside still waters when we were hoping for “white water” excitement, it is hard to believe anything really vital is taking place. God is silent. The house is silent. The phone doesn’t ring. The mailbox is empty. The stillness is hard to bear—and God knows that. He knows our frame and remembers we are made of dust. He is very patient with us when we are trying to be patient with Him. Of course for most of us this test of waiting does not take place in a silent and empty house, but in the course of regular work and appointments and taxpaying and grocery buying and trying to have the car fixed and the storm windows up; daily decisions have to go on being made, responsibilities fulfilled, families provided for, employers satisfied. How can we speak of waiting on God in the middle of all that? How be still?
There is a secret place where the Christian dwells. It is the shadow of the Almighty. Transactions take place there which none but God know.
A tiny scrap of lined notebook paper says this:
I just want to thank you for preaching simply the Cross. Please never stop proclaiming it. I must die daily to have resurrection life in my calling. . . . So you might want to pray for me, if you think of it. I’m a very young girl with a very big test of faith and obedience before me. I know I am in His will now in this area, and the Lord has ministered to me so specially, but obedience doesn’t always tickle.
These are letters from women. It seems to me there is one aspect of waiting on God in the matter of marriage that is different for women than for men. I cannot prove my conclusions, but I offer the reasons for those conclusions for your consideration.
The archetypal feminine characteristic is receptivity, as we can learn from the human form (the female body is made to receive), and from the Genesis account of creation (the woman was made for the man). Because all human creatures are dependent on God for life, the soul (whether that of a man or a woman) is a receptor, and therefore has always been viewed as feminine. God is always the initiator in the soul’s relation to Him. We are receivers of God’s grace and responders to Him in gratitude. The metaphor of Bridegroom and Bride is used in Scripture to describe the relationship between God and his people—God the Creator, the great Initiator, His people the receivers of all. “God is so masculine,” said C. S. Lewis, “that all creation is feminine by comparison.”
As those who represent the Bride in the great Mystery of Marriage, women have a special reason to wait on God. They were not created for headship in the special way that men were. Therefore it seems reasonable that if God wants a woman to marry, He will see to it that the man finds her. She need not go out hunting (I didn’t, and three of them found me). When I was a little girl, my parents told me that if I got lost in a crowd, I was to stand still in one place and they would find me. If both they and I were searching, we might miss each other. So might a man and a woman.
St. Teresa of Jesus distills the very essence of submissive waiting in these words:
Let nothing trouble thee.
Let nothing frighten thee.
All things pass away.
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
Nothing is wanting to him who possesses God.
God alone suffices.
The man, I think, has a different responsibility when it comes to marriage. He ought to do the searching. This may be a quirky prejudice of my own just because it was what my mother always told me and it certainly worked in my case, but then again it might have something to do with The Way Things Are, an arrangement that goes back to the beginning of time.
Adam did not go out looking for a woman. There weren’t any. He didn’t know what a woman was. When God decided it was not a good thing for him to be alone, He then made all the wild animals and all the birds of heaven. Adam named them all, and the account gives me the impression that he and God were surveying each animal or bird to see whether it might make a companion for him, “But for the man himself no partner had yet been found.” So God custom-made that needed partner, brought her to Adam to “husband”—to be her protector and provider.
Most marriages, in most of human history, I suppose, have been arranged. Abraham sent a servant to find a wife for his son Isaac. It is still the custom in many parts of the world, India, Africa, and China among them, but the modern American can hardly conceive of such a thing, in spite of the far higher rate of success of that method than of our do-it-yourself.
Am I recommending a return to the ancient way? I would like to, but I refrain. Instead I would say that if a man is to walk with God, surely he needs to come to grips, before he enters into any emotional involvements with women, with whether or not marriage is a part of his God-given task. If it is, then the pattern shows that he is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church. He must begin as Christ does, by wooing and winning, by calling her to himself, risking rejection, taking the initiative, sacrificing himself. It’s a serious business. Before tackling it he should submit himself to the disciplines of Psalm 37 as given above. When these are skipped, confusion and heartbreak result.
Two months after Jim Elliot and I had talked about the gift of singleness, he sat one rainy November morning at his desk, gazing glumly out at the soaked side yard of his parents’ house. It was during his year of “waiting.” He was desperate to get to his mission work in South America, but felt he needed to wait for a year in order to study, to be at home and be quiet, and to be under the spiritual tutelage of his father, as Timothy was under the apostle Paul. To make matters more difficult, he was, to use the current phrase, “emotionally involved.” He called it being in love. He wondered sometimes if he had run ahead of God in letting me know it. It had certainly complicated his life and mine. Yet he was still praying and waiting for guidance, trying to be obedient and finding that it didn’t “tickle.” Long after God had given him the answer I found these lines in his handwriting, with the date, November 10, 1949:
May I then not know her love
Up close, her warm, unhindered flesh
Against my own? Must rather feel
Wind-kisses, and watch
The twining of the vines on forest trees?
Must see in these the emblems of it all?
Oh, must I still walk woodsy paths alone,
And push quietly to rest
With cast-off pine needles?
Caress, wind;
Sigh, you firs;
Cling closely, vines;
Warm one another, naked needles:
Die, love within.
Oh, fiery anguish of the passion-flame
Of youth, I beg of you,
Be quelled. Cease
Spitting embers through my frame.
And you, daughters of Jerusalem,
Wherever you may be,
Run to your Lord and tell Him,
Tell Him now for me
That I am sick of love.
Obviously Jim had been saturating himself in the great love poem of the Bible, the Song of Solomon. He had been encouraged by a chapel speaker in college not to stir up or awake love “until it please,” which the speaker took to refer to God’s timing, which is always perfect. While Jim waited for that time, he determined to discipline his behavior toward me and the expression of his desire, but he did not refuse to acknowledge plainly before God the workings of his heart. This can be a source of great comfort, far more comfort than the neurotic effort to insulate oneself from reality, refusing to be touched by it. Take it honestly to Him who is “no High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses—he himself has shared fully in all our experience of temptation, except that he never sinned” (Heb. 4:15 Phillips). He will understand.
This kind of waiting I refer to here is not mere marking time because of timidity, or “the indecision that can make no choice, the irresolution that carries no choice into act.”2 Waiting on God is an act of faith—the greatest thing ever required of us humans. Not faith in the outcome we are dictating to God, but faith in His character, faith in Himself. It is resting in the perfect confidence that He will guide in the right way, at the right time. He will supply our need. He will fulfill His word. He will give us the very best if we trust Him.
A woman’s waiting, regarding the question of marriage, means leaving the whole thing in God’s hands. A man’s waiting means asking whether he should plan for marriage. He may need to wait a long time for a yes or no. I would suggest that he give up dating until he knows. It will be much easier to concentrate.
If the answer seems to be yes, it is a good idea to ask older Christians who can keep their mouths shut to pray for you. Ask them for specific suggestions as to someone they think suitable. Take their suggestions seriously. Move in the direction of the will of God.
I met Lars, the man who was to become my husband, the day after my second husband, Add, died. He had just arrived as a student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary where Add had been a professor. He went to a chapel service in which various people spoke of what Add had meant to them. I said a few words, and Lars took note.
Years later a casual friendship had developed into (in his mind) something more. He came often to see me, occasionally took me to dinner, brought me flowers. Any woman understands these gestures, but we never spoke of a “relationship.” It took me a long time to consider him as anything but a very easy-to-have-around friend. I could not imagine a third marriage. But when I saw that he was moving toward a proposal, I had to get down to business and pray about what my answer should be. I was middle-aged, of course, and had been through this twice before, but there are no “experts” in prayer and faith. It was the same slow and certain light I had to seek and wait for. I not only prayed and waited, but also asked counsel of several godly people who knew both of us.
My prayers brought an unlooked-for answer. I began to detect in my heart a wholly new sort of interest in this man. In addition to the gentlemanliness and charm which had been obvious in our first meeting, I saw a servant-heart. I saw his own great tact and care in his treatment of me as a woman and a widow. Like Jim and Add, he was manly. Manliness has always touched a very deep chord in me. I was impressed, too, with his willingness to wait, so quietly and so long. More than four years after that chapel service where he saw me, he asked me to marry him.
Waiting is an offering and a sacrifice. We may lift up our very waiting to Him as a daily oblation, in a spirit of expectancy—like Linda’s, who asks daily only for God’s agenda. Waiting on God in this way is true faith—no agenda of one’s own, no deadlines, no demands on what God must do. Simply an open heart and open hands ready to receive that which God shall choose, and a perfect confidence that what He chooses will be better than our best. God takes the part of that kind of soul.
“Never has ear heard or eye seen any other god taking the part of those who wait for him. Thou dost welcome him who rejoices to do what is right” (Isa. 64:4–5 NEB).