Aug 12, 2011
On Surviving Gaps and Waiting on God
For a few summers in my Jr. High and High School years, I spent a week with family at the beaches of North Carolina. The ocean down there was pretty rough in comparison to the tame beaches of New Jersey that I’d known for my entire life.
You had to leave your feet in order to reach any decent waves, but then the current would grab you and send you down a block. I’d ride a wave in, and then walk back to where I’d started. The first few times I left my feet and put myself at the mercy of the current was quite uncomfortable.
There’s this unsettling moment where you’re standing on firm ground and you want to get somewhere else, but you need to leave what is solid and certain in order to get there. There was a gap in my plans between leaving the beach and catching a wave, a gap where something could go wrong and a rip current could drag me out to sea.
Speaking for myself, sometimes in life I don’t know whether I’m in the clear, safely riding in the wave or still bobbing in the water, waiting for the next thing. It’s easy to second guess myself and to worry if I’ve made poor decisions instead of acting out of faith.
So much in our lives hinges on hearing God.
I don’t know why this is, but it’s always easier to panic and worry than to stop and seek God’s leading. Why is that? Perhaps worry at least feels like we have some semblance of control.
The last verse of Matthew’s Gospel shares this from Jesus, “Be sure of this: I am with you always, even until the end of the age.”
It’s a comfort to know that we have a God who not only sends us into the world to do his work, but he promises to go with us. If we can stop, wait, and listen for his leading, he’ll be there for us. Perhaps he won’t show up in ways that we expect, but as we discipline ourselves to wait patiently, something the Psalms talk about quite a bit, we’ll find that he is more than able to give us the faith and hope to survive our gaps.
I wish I knew why some folks go through tougher or longer gaps than others. In my own life, I’ve noticed that God sometimes delays giving me things that I want because either A) I’m not ready to do anything worthwhile with them or B) I don’t really need them.
If we are in a relationship with a God who promises to be with us, we need to lean heavily on that promise during the gaps in our lives. A gap between what we know and what we want presents us with the uncomfortable but valuable lesson that we can have joy when God alone sustains us.
We just may find that we’ll be better prepared for the next season in our lives if we learn from the gaps.
