What is that Word ‘Wait’?

We live in a world that is instant everything! We drum our fingers, sigh and explode if the file we are downloading takes more than 2 seconds. Food is acquired by delivery or drive through, microwaved and eaten in mere minutes. We Facetime, Skype, or use another favorite app to communicate with friends and family around the world. We fly to get there in a few hours instead of days or weeks of travel. But wait? That is not something we do very well. There is at least one thing that still teaches us patience. It still takes about 9 months from conception to birth of a baby. We cannot rush the cell-by-cell growth of the fertilized and implanted egg in the womb as God does His work of creating another human being! Then we rush headlong into life and gasp when we begin to realize that we may only have a few years left as we reach our “golden years.”

God seldom moves at that pace. He understands that good things take time. The best food is that which is cooked, roasted, prepared slowly with much love and savored slowly with family and friends. The best times together are those when we slow down for a good conversation without one or the other of us having to rush off. And those who take the time to meet with God without throwing prayers like darts as we run by, find that the time with God is refreshing and enlightening and pulls us deep into a relationship with Him and sometimes calls us out to things much bigger than ourselves!

“When the Lord saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him from the middle of the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!’ ‘Here I am,’ Moses replied.” Exodus 3:4

I don’t know about you, but if I heard a voice coming from a burning bush, I don’t think I would calmly say, “Here I am!” Unless I knew the voice. The story of Moses’ early life is brief and without a lot of details. He was born to a Hebrew family in Egypt during a time of extreme oppression. His family had been instructed to throw any baby boys into the river! Of course, his parents couldn’t do that! They kept him as long as they could, then placed him in a basket in the river being watched from a distance by his sister. He was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter who apparently had a much softer heart than her father. He needed a wet nurse and through the quick thinking of his sister, he was given back to his mother until he was weened. In those days, that would have given her the better part of the preschool years with him. In those years, Moses would have learned the Hebrew language and begun to learn about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Hebrew people would have lived with the hope and promise of returning to Canaan prophesied by Jacob and Joseph.

Like any adopted or foster child, Moses would have always had a longing in his heart to return to his people even while enjoying the ‘good life’ in the palace of Pharaoh. In that longing, I wonder if Moses prayed and talked to God regularly even while learning the Egyptian way of life and the skills of leadership. I wonder if he prayed for his family and prayed to be returned to them. There was something there or he would never have attacked the Egyptian who was torturing a Hebrew slave. But the time wasn’t right, and Moses had to flee for his life and ended up in Midian where he married, started a family, and lived as a shepherd for many years.

During his time there, he must have continued to talk and walk regularly with God and likely prayed for his Hebrew family who were still very oppressed as slaves in Egypt. Have you ever prayed and prayed for something/someone and then one day you hear God say, “Let’s go! I want to use you as my instrument to answer your prayer.” I wonder if that is what happened with Moses and that is why he so quickly said, “Here I am.”

As that conversation went on, God began to get very specific and asked Moses to go back to Egypt. Through those years, God had been grooming Moses for one of the biggest jobs He ever asked a man to do! He had not rushed Moses. He was working through the infancy, toddler, primary, teen, young adult, and manhood years of Moses’ life, patiently preparing Moses for what was to come – the leading of several million people on a 40-year camping trip in the dessert without a supply wagon! Who in their right mind would accept that job offer? Only someone who walked intimately with God and understood the calling.

Lord, help me to be patient, to wait, and to sit at your feet learning from you, and then to be obedient when you call me out to go where you call me to go and to speak what you teach me to say. Amen.