Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

How to Wait Well

alarm_clock_leftIn the course of any life, I think, there are seasons of waiting. As much as we want to fast-forward to that thing we’re anticipating, we find ourselves faced with factors we can’t control, leaving us helpless against a clock we can’t set or predict.

It’s a vulnerable place to find yourself at the mercy of a calendar that’s not your own.

Maybe you’ve been looking for a job for so long that the taste of rejection is more familiar than your morning coffee. You send yet another résumé into cyberspace, and you wait . . . and wait some more.

Or maybe you’ve watched as all your friends have found love, and you find yourself alone . . . still waiting to be chosen, pursued.

Maybe you’ve been longing for a child—one from your own body or one from across the globe. You’ve jumped through all the hoops, and now there’s nothing left to do but wait.

Or maybe there’s something else you’re waiting for: for your house to sell, for the medical test results to come in, for a relationship to be reconciled, for deliverance from whatever demon has been plaguing you.

We all wait—there’s no avoiding it, no matter our life stage. Even if we get the thing we’ve been waiting for, it only means graduating to a new phase of waiting we hadn’t anticipated. So the question isn’t if we will wait; it’s how we will wait.

As I look back on various seasons of waiting in my life, I realize my waiting style leaves something to be desired. I’ve waited like a child in line at the grocery store: impatient, antsy, so focused on the line that I couldn’t appreciate anything else around me. I’ve waited like a robot, deciding it was too painful to admit my desires and hopes, so I tried to shut down my heart.

But the psalmist provides another alterative when it comes to how to wait: We can wait on God the way a handmaiden waits on her mistress:

As the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he has mercy upon us.
Psalm 123:2

What would it look like, I wonder, to be that attentive to God in my waiting? What if, instead of being so focused on my circumstances or my worries or my fears, I was focused on every little move God was making?

What if I was intent not just on what God would do for me during the waiting as on what I could do for God?

I don’t just want to wait for him. I want to wait on him.

***

The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.
Charles Spurgeon

Friday Favorites for March

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Happy Friday! Here are a few of my favorites things lately. Hope you enjoy!

For anyone who celebrated National Grammar Day . . .

It was National Grammar Day earlier this month, and I found these grammar-themed haiku hilarious: 24 Haiku in Honor of National Grammar Day

For anyone who loves a theme party . . .

These literary-themed parties will hold you over amid the doldrums of March: 8 Literary Party Themes 

For anyone who needs to be reminded of the power of what we say (and don’t say) . . .

When’s the last time you told someone you were proud of them? Good words about encouragement from Shauna Niequist: Use Your Words

For anyone who needs a laugh today . . .  

In general, I’m not pro-vandalism. But these vandalized signs make wonder if I should reconsider: 33 Vandalized Signs

For anyone who is waiting for something . . .

Some wise words on waiting well from Nicole Eunice: “Is the difference between good and best usually only found in waiting?” Waiting Doesn’t Care How You Treat It

New Thursday

Perhaps no other week in the year is as full of dramatic turnarounds as this one.

Good Friday turns into Easter.
Winter melts into spring.
Sadness turns to joy.
Despair is trumped by hope.
Death is trounced by life.

Christianity is marked by those defining moments when everything changes: Creation. Exodus. Incarnation. And so it is with Maundy Thursday. On that night, the whole tilt of the earth shifted. On that night, Jesus made a proclamation that reframed all that was and all that will be:

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.
—John 13:34

The English word Maundy comes from the Latin word mandatum (mandate or command), the first word of the phrase “Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos” (“A new command I give you . . .”).

The Old Testament records some 600 laws and rules. Yet in that seismic shift the night before his death, Jesus installed just one new law that covered all the old ones. Love, he said. Love, love, and more love.

But before new could replace old, before life could replace death, before Easter morning could dawn in all its glory, there had to be that long, dark night between Good Friday and resurrection.

According to Watchman Nee, the same is true for us:

God must bring us to a point—I cannot tell you how it will be, but he will do it—where, through a deep and dark experience, our natural power is touched, and fundamentally weakened, so that we no longer dare trust ourselves. . . .

We would like to have death and resurrection put together within one hour of each other. We cannot face the thought that God will keep us aside for so long a time; we cannot bear to wait. . . . All is in darkness, but it is only for a night. It must indeed be a full night, but that is all. Afterwards you will find that everything is given back to you in glorious resurrection; and nothing can measure the difference between what was before and what now is!

—Watchman Nee

Do not fear that dark night. It must come to make space for new life. For Easter. For resurrection.

Healing of the Slow Variety

Two people I love are struggling with physical ailments right now—the kind where doctors can’t quite figure out what’s going on and recovery is agonizingly slow.

I’ve been praying for a miracle for them—a miracle of the quick variety. There is some precedent for these kinds of speedy healings in the Bible. Many times throughout the Gospels, Jesus puts his hand on someone and brings instant recovery. The deaf hear. The blind see. Pick up your mat and go home. 

After reading story upon story in the Gospels when Jesus merely says the word and a little girl is healed, or a woman touches the hem of his garment and is immediately restored, I was a bit surprised by Mark’s account of a blind man who was brought to Jesus for healing:

Some people brought a blind man to Jesus, and they begged him to touch the man and heal him. Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village. Then, spitting on the man’s eyes, he laid his hands on him and asked, “Can you see anything now?”

The man looked around. “Yes,” he said, “I see people, but I can’t see them very clearly. They look like trees walking around.”

Then Jesus placed his hands on the man’s eyes again, and his eyes were opened. His sight was completely restored, and he could see everything clearly.

—Mark 8:22-25

Why, I wonder, did Jesus have to touch the man’s eyes twice before he could see clearly? No doubt Jesus had the power to heal in one fell swoop if he’d wanted to, as he’d done on numerous occasions in the past. So what was different this time?

I can only venture guesses as to why. Maybe the gradual healing was for the blind man’s sake. Maybe he was able to more fully appreciate his sight when it was unveiled to him one step at a time. Or maybe the phases of healing were so the blind man could share his unique story afterward.

I recently had the privilege of hearing Steve Saint speak. This once active man, the founder of the nonprofit ministry I-TEC, spoke to my company via Skype from his bed, where he has been confined for the past several months. In June of this year, he was injured by a piece of equipment he was testing, leaving him an incomplete paraplegic.

Steve is currently in the agonizing process of relearning the most basic of skills—figuring out where his hand is and then trying to make it move. People around the world are praying for a miracle for him, but at this point it doesn’t look like it’s going to be the one-step instantaneous type of miracle. It looks like for him, healing may come in stages.

But as difficult as this process must be for him and for his family, I am struck by the extraordinary testimony Steve has to tell as a result. It’s one thing to remain faithful to God when he does the quick miracle and you’re back to life as usual. It’s another thing altogether to proclaim God’s goodness while you’re flat on your back, struggling to swallow your own saliva.

“The church in America is used to serving out of a place of strength,” Steve said. “But now I’ve been given a gift. I’m learning what it means to serve out of my weakness.”

At the end of his talk, Steve shared the words of a poem called “The Thorn.” He knows now, in a whole new way, what it is to be a mendicant, a beggar, before God’s throne.

I stood a mendicant of God before His royal throne
And begged him for one priceless gift, which I could call my own.
I took the gift from out His hand, but as I would depart
I cried, “But Lord this is a thorn and it has pierced my heart.
This is a strange, a hurtful gift, which Thou hast given me.”
He said, “My child, I give good gifts and gave My best to thee.”
I took it home and though at first the cruel thorn hurt sore,
As long years passed I learned at last to love it more and more.
I learned He never gives a thorn without this added grace,
He takes the thorn to pin aside the veil which hides His face.

—“The Thorn” by Martha Snell Nicholson

* * *

Lord, we are beggars, every one of us. We beg you for healing, whether it comes in a moment or a lifetime. In the meantime, give us the story you want us to tell—and the courage to tell it.

I’ve taken the challenge of reading the Bible chronologically this year and tracing the thread of grace through it. These musings are prompted by my reading. I’d love to have you join me: One Year Bible reading plan.

The Pages In Between

I was surprised to turn the page of my Bible the other day and discover that I’d jumped straight from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Since I’m reading the Chronological Bible, I didn’t have the usual clues like divider pages or those handy-dandy little thumb tabs to alert me.

According to canonical order, Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament, but scholars think Joel was actually the last of the prophets to give a message before the arrival of the Messiah. If that’s the case, then these are the final words God spoke to his people before the new covenant was ushered in. They are words full of hope and promise, grace and truth:

Judah will be filled with people forever,
and Jerusalem will endure through all generations.
I will pardon my people’s crimes,
which I have not yet pardoned;
and I, the Lord, will make my home
in Jerusalem with my people.
—Joel 3:20-21

With a simple turn of the page, I was amazed to see that promise directly fulfilled in the person of Christ:

The Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness.
—John 1:14

God’s last words in the old covenant consisted of the promise to make his home with his people. And sure enough, in the book of John, Jesus is revealed as God in human form, moving into our neighborhood.

But things weren’t so clear cut for the people living in those years between Joel’s final prophesy and the angels’ announcement of Jesus’ arrival. They couldn’t just turn to the next chapter to see the fulfillment—they had to wait. And wait. And wait.

They waited for some 400 years, in fact. Think about it—for us that would be like getting a promise in the 1600s, in the days of Galileo or Shakespeare, and not seeing the results until now. With each passing generation, it must have gotten harder for the Israelites to hold on to this promise of Immanuel, harder to feel the truth of it, harder to believe it would actually happen one day.

It had to be hard to live in those blank pages between the two testaments.

And although today we have both the BC and the AD parts of the story, we often find ourselves in a similar spot, wondering and waiting on our own blank pages between the promise and the fulfillment. We have God’s words in broad strokes—that he will save and redeem and make all things new again—but there are so many things we don’t know while we wait. What, exactly, will it look like when the promise is fulfilled? Why do we have to wait? And perhaps most of all, for how long?

I don’t want to grow weary as I wait. I don’t want to forget the promise. I don’t want my belief to fade into little more than a distant memory. I want to wait well.

Come, Lord Jesus. Make your home among us. And in the meantime, let us wait with patience and hope whenever we find ourselves on the blank pages in between.

I’ve taken the challenge of reading the Bible chronologically this year and tracing the thread of grace through it. These musings are prompted by my reading. I’d love to have you join me: One Year Bible reading plan.

Waiting and Other Acts of Heroism

At this point in my chronological Bible reading, heroes abound: Samson, the muscle man who famously took down the Philistine temple with his bare hands. Gideon, the army commander who led a band of ragtag soldiers to defeat a daunting enemy. Ehud, the leftie who plunged his dagger into the gut of the opposing king.

But it wasn’t until I hit 1 Samuel that I discovered someone truly heroic: an unassuming woman named Hannah. She had no battle victories under her belt, no enemy kills, no feats of physical strength. Her claim to fame: she was a good waiter.

Hannah longed desperately for a baby, but month after month, year after year, nothing changed. She was raw with the waiting, aching over the silence that met her request each time. She didn’t try to hide the hurt of her unanswered prayers. When she went to the Tabernacle to cry out to God, Scripture says she “was in deep anguish, crying bitterly as she prayed to the LORD” (1 Samuel 1:10).

Yet even in the face of her anguish, she didn’t give up hope. In my book, that takes more courage than any battlefield heroics.

My friend Heather has been aching for a baby for six long years. After several miscarriages and unsuccessful medical interventions, she and her husband have ventured onto the roller coaster of domestic adoption. I’ve watched their hopes soar and plummet with each new possibility, each phone call.

After carefully filling out form after form in what Heather refers to as a “paper pregnancy,” going through a battery of interviews and tests, and writing an extensive profile complete with photos and essays, Heather and Rick figured the only thing left to do was wait.

They just never imagined they’d be waiting this long.

One birth mother agreed to have them adopt her little girl, but near the end of her pregnancy she decided she wanted siblings for the baby and went with another family instead. A teenage girl they’d connected with miscarried late term. Another woman changed her mind and decided to raise her child on her own.

Right now Heather and Rick find themselves in the position of waiting yet again. They were scheduled to meet with another birth mother last week, but she canceled at the last minute, saying she needed more time to think.

Like Hannah, there are days when Heather grieves and cries out in anguish to her God. Yet she keeps hoping, even when it means putting her heart out there to get hurt again. She keeps praying, even when it feels like her prayers are met with haunting silence. And through it all, she keeps holding on to the very God who heard Hannah’s cries.

The part of Hannah’s story that I find most inspiring is the timing of her heart change. I guess I’d always assumed her grieving stopped after her miracle baby was born. But as I look more closely at the story, I realize that’s not quite the chronology:

“In that case,” Eli [the priest] said, “go in peace! May the God of Israel grant the request you have asked of him.”

“Oh, thank you, sir!” she exclaimed. Then she went back and began to eat again, and she was no longer sad.

—1 Samuel 1:17-18

The joy came first, then the answer.

Hannah’s joy didn’t depend on having the miracle in hand. It was enough that God heard her plea.

Someday, by God’s grace, I hope I’ll be able to wait with that kind of joy. Like my heroes, Hannah and Heather.

I’ve taken the challenge of reading the Bible chronologically this year and tracing the thread of grace through it. These musings are prompted by my reading. I’d love to have you join me: One Year Bible reading plan.