Waiting on God
/The other day, I was sitting with my 5 year old nephew waiting on a large game file to download onto my Playstation. As we were on the couch anxiously waiting for the file to finish, it decided to slow down at the 97% mark. I noticed that my nephew covered eyes with his hands and he began to pray: “Lord Jesus, please help that when I open my eyes that this download will be done.” To his disappointment, when he opened his eyes the download was still at 97%. So he prayed again… After a while he became frustrated and said, “God isn’t listening to my prayers.”
After my nephew expressed his frustration, I just told him that this was a download and that things like that just take time to work. I told him that it had nothing to do with whether or not God was listening to our prayers. I told him that sometimes God’s answer doesn’t come right when we want it to. He was fine with that explanation and went on completely secure in God’s love for him.
But I thought more about that moment later… I realized that so often I can act the same way towards God when I don’t get an immediate response to my prayers. If God is slow in answering me I can begin to doubt his care for me. But in reality, when I look at it from God’s perspective, all of my requests are like that game download. They are processes that take time to be accomplished. God has a perfect time for when they will be completed, and that time is completely up to Him. Just like I can’t rush my bandwidth to speed up a download, I can’t rush God.
Scripture is filled with examples of people waiting on God to fulfill what He had promised them. Look at any of the lives mentioned in Hebrews 11… They had to wait for God’s perfect timing. I can’t go wrong in waiting on God’s timing.
“No one who waits for You will be disgraced…”