Never Walked In High Heels

Nobody in Sunday school ever teaches us that waiting is such an act of faith. 

When someone says, “Living on faith,” our mind automatically goes to some poor missionary family living in hostile Russia, speaking out illegally, and having Bible studies in their living room with the authorities at their door, ready to barge in at any moment. And while this form of faith is to be applauded, victorious bravery is not the only kind of faith there is.

When Noah built the ark in a region of the desert that had not seen rain for years, that was an act of faith. Going into his workshop every day, molding the wood because God told him to, when everyone else thought he was a madman, was really asking for trouble in a lot of ways. We look at the story of Noah, and we see faith, we see virtue largely in the second part of the story. The man who collected animals in order to save them and lived in his boat for weeks as the flood waters rose and fell. It is, of course, amazing that God singled out this family to survive the destruction of the world as He pulled out His Etch-a-Sketch and decided to start over, but this version  forgets about the years of work preceding the flood and the effort it took to build the ark. 

No doubt he was laughed at, scorned, and even harassed to varying levels of degrees in his own workshop. In many ways, it was the day to day mundane faith it took to believe in the voice of God and build a contraption that few in the region had ever seen, which was more noble than waiting and serving the creatures of God on a boat during the flood. 

It is all too common for us contemporary Christians to dismiss our lives as being too mundane to excitingly serve God. As Francis Bacon wrote, “Large changes are easier than small,” and it seems that we fantasize that God can only be glorified through the exciting service on the mission field rather than within the lives of suburbia. If I was to tell you that God demands the same from both of His servants, many people would take that to mean that everyone should sell their possessions and move to the bush. Then what would happen to suburbia?

God didn’t first ask Noah’s neighbors to build an ark and was declined by those neighbors. Nor did He ask Noah to take such extreme measures regularly throughout his life. Rather, it was the day by day form of living at the meal table in the garden and how Noah interacted with members of his own community that made God point the finger at Noah and say, “This family I love. And this family I shall save.” 

I think we often trick ourselves into thinking less is assumed of us because God made us bankers or doctors or even janitors, but God asks a man who is slow of speech to be the leader of the Israelites out of Egypt. God does not make extraordinary people to serve in extraordinary situations. Rather, we are all ordinary people, handcrafted by God and each deeply and intricately made in detail to be in the exact position we find ourselves in, be it a lawmaker or a janitor, and we specifically are made to serve in those parts. So, so much of that is, of course, waiting patiently for God to show Himself to us. 

Waiting is a limbo. Waiting is probably one of the most annoying parts of the human condition as it means that we once again have to give up control. There’s nothing we can do, no way to change the situation, no way to speed things up or slow things down. It’s not like our math books in school where we can peek at the back and find out the answer. And in that waiting time, we question everything. We all do. It’s human nature. Did we read the signs correctly? Did we miss anything? Will God provide, or are we just deluding ourselves? And every day, of course, that waiting becomes more and more difficult to deal with. It’s supposed to. Giving up control is always supposed to become difficult.

When we wait, we watch God, realizing that our hands are tied, and there’s little else we can do. Sometimes God is visible through our waiting, but more often than not, we find ourselves questioning His existence as much as growing impatient. Every leaf that shudders during this time, we try to fit into our cosmology as one would the bottom of a teacup after emptying its contents. We think our hands are tied, and as I’ve said before, there is little we can do, but, of course, there is much we can do as well. We cannot speed up or slow down what we are waiting for, but this is the time that we must allow God to work and glorify the work that He is doing, even when we doubt its existence.