Those Who Wait Upon the LORD

Waiting isn’t most people’s favorite activity.  As a matter of fact, I hate waiting.  I will take alternate routes to avoid waiting at stoplights or being stuck in traffic.  I will treat the checkout lanes like a NASCAR event in which I–like so many others–rapidly scan all the lanes to assess which has the shortest line and develop a quick algorithm to determine which clerk is the fastest and whose items are the smallest quantity.  Then, to make matters worse, I get in a lane and second-guess myself as I watch my competitors achieve checkout status sooner than I do.  Waiting is something that seems to be a waste of time.

Waiting upon the LORD is different.  That’s because the results aren’t up to people.  The results are up to God.  When we wait upon people, we encounter price checks and coupons and no UPC codes.  When we wait upon God, we wait upon One whose timing is always perfect.  What seems to us as a delay is actually the parenthesis in which God continues His work unseen to us.  While He continues to work, He tells us that we will regain our strength.  We will be renewed, refreshed, and recharged.  Frankly, the battle many of us face on a daily basis is beyond our ability to endure.  But when we wait upon the LORD, He fights the battle because these spiritual battles are His to fight.  Yet, there are useful activities we can do during the parenthesis of God’s solo effort which will refresh us until we can rejoin Him in the work He is doing.  We can worship God in song, read Scripture, pray, or engage in other spiritual disciplines such as fasting while we wait upon Him.   He needs no parenthesis of refreshment because He is God.  Our humanity makes us frail but a testimony to God’s love and grace is that He refreshes us when we wait upon Him.