It's Not Time Yet!

It’s funny the little spiritual insights you gain from owning a dog. I love my little (well, okay, she’s not so little thanks to the fact that we love to feed her treats and only like to walk her from the living room to the bedroom) beagle named Allie. She’s a loving, affectionate, playful dog, but as you can infer from my previous parenthetical statement, she LOVES to eat. I am blessed to have a study in my home, and there are days that I will spend the bulk of my “office hours” there in order to get some good studying and sermon preparation done. On those days, Allie is living the blissful life of not being constrained to her crate. Every day, she gets her second cup of food at 4 p.m. However, it seems to never fail that when I am working from home, she will push me to feed her at 3 p.m. instead. She gives me those eyes. She goes to the backdoor, asking to “go potty,” (we always make her do that first when we get home before we feed her). She will bang her bowls together and look longingly at me. But I don’t give in. As if she can understand English, I always tell her, “It’s not time yet. You have to wait.” I wish I could just get her to understand that the gratification she longs for is coming very, very soon. She just has to wait a little longer, because it is not time yet. One of my favorite songs that we sing at my church for worship starts with the words, “Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord.” It is a great rendition of Isaiah 40:28-31 which reads, “Do you not know? Have you not hard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youth grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in (in the King James wait on) the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, the will walk and not be faint,” (NIV84). What are you waiting for? At times, I have waited for God’s clear direction on a very important life decision. I just wish He would write it in the sky for me sometimes. But instead, I have to halt my life, pray and commune with God, and then wait and listen for His answer. At times, I have seen family and friends wait for His healing as they have battled surgery, illness, and disease. At times, we wonder when Christ will return and end this crazy world of pain, sin, and suffering. Some have done this to a fault, such as Harold Camping who predicted the end of the world would happen back on May 21. He has since changed his prediction to October 21 (coming soon). But we are reminded of the very words of Jesus who said, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father,” (Matthew 24:36). But instead, Jesus exhorts us to, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour,” (Matthew 25:13). In other words, we WAIT. It’s not time yet. As we wait longingly for God to move in a way we feel like He needs to move, remember first of all that HE is on His throne. His ways are higher than our ways, and that we must submit our longings for what we THINK is best for us to what HE KNOWS is best for us. And while we do that, we continue to wait. How? We wait by living wholeheartedly for Him, praying fervently to Him, growing more closely to Him, serving others and bringing others to Him. If we wait like this, the time will come when we will see things more through His eyes, and the very things we may be waiting for will come in HIS time. Or perhaps we will even realize the things we were waiting on fade away completely from our minds compared the wonderment of living a life filled with God. What are you waiting for? And how are you waiting?