The Waiting Prayer

Waiting certainly plays an enormous role in the unfolding story of God’s relationship to man. It is God’s oft-repeated way of teaching us that His power is real and that He can answer our prayers without interference and manipulation from us.

But we have such trouble getting our will, our time schedules out of the way. Much of the time we act like a child who brings a broken toy to his father to be mended. The father gladly takes the toy and begins work. Then after a while, childlike impatience takes over. Why is it taking so long?

The child stands by, getting his hands in the father’s way, offering a lot of meaningless advice and some rather silly criticism. Finally in desperation, he snatches the toy from the father’s hands and walks with it, saying rather bitterly that he hadn’t really thought his father could fix it anyway. Perhaps it isn’t even “his will” to mend toys.

On the other hand, whenever we are trustful enough to leave our “broken toy” with the Father, not only do we eventually get it back gloriously restored, but are also handed a surprising plus. We find for ourselves what the saints and mystics affirm, that during the dark waiting period when self-effort had ceased, a spurt of astonishing spiritual growth took place in us. Afterwards we have qualities like more patience, more love for the Lord and those around us, more ability to hear His voice, greater willingness to obey.

The divine Husbandman has been teaching us the lesson of the Life in the Vine. During that waiting period (what seemed like a dark night of the soul) we were learning the great secret of abiding. Abiding is the key to unlock heaven’s treasures. (John 15:1-8)

Our human hang-up is thinking that spirituality is something we do. “Not so,” says Jesus. “Rather it is My life in you.” The branch does not have to stretch and strain to grow and produce fruit. The branch’s part is simply to remain connected to the Vine, to abide there so that the life-giving sap can flow. Then only do we “bear much fruit.”

Jesus also had a great deal to say about His Father’s timing, the principle that there is a God-given sequence and rate of growth for everything in His Creation: “First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.” (Mark4:28)

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand,” (Mark 1:15) Jesus might say. Or when certain disciples were trying to get Him to act prematurely, “My time is not yet come….” (John 7:6) Later as the shadows deepened around the Cross, “My time is at hand.” (Matthew 26:18) Always His timing. We force and try to hurry the divine schedule at our peril.

God does have His “fullness of time” for the answer to each prayer. It follows then that He alone knows the magnitude of the changes that have to be wrought in us before we can receive our hearts’ desires. He alone knows the changes and interplay of external events that must take place before our prayer can be answered. That’s why Jesus told us, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” (Acts 1:7)

Thus the Lord seems constantly to use waiting as a tool for bringing us the very best of His gifts. He made the children of Israel wait generations for their freedom from slavery in Egypt. Because of their stubborn disobedience, they had to wait forty years before they were ready to enter the Promised Land. Waiting was the keynote of the exile. The whole story of the Old Testament is the patient waiting for “the fullness of time” of the Savior’s birth. And after Jesus’ ascension, those gathered in the upper room had to wait a full ten days for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

No wonder some of God’s promises are predicted upon our waiting trustingly for His timing:

The Lord is good unto them that wait for him… (Lamentations 3:25)

Those that wait on the Lord shall possess the land. (Psalm 37:9)

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)

For since the world began no one has seen or heard of such a God as ours, who works for those who wait for him! (Isaiah 64:4)

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9)

Waiting seems to be a kind of acted-out prayer that is required more often and honored more often than I could understand until I saw what remarkable faith-muscles this action develops. For isn’t it true that waiting demands patience, persistence, trust, expectancy—all the qualities we are continually beseeching God to give us?

So the Bible extols waiting, partly because it requires qualities which the Lord wants to encourage in us, like patience, which I need so badly. But there is another reason too. Waiting works. It is a joining of man and God to achieve an end, and the end is always a form of the Easter story.

An incident I’ve never forgotten is related by Patt Barnes of Milwaukee, who tells of an aged flower vendor he once met who taught him the secret of the “three days.” Patt was so impressed by the old woman’s visible radiant joy that he commented that her life must be remarkably trouble free. Oh no, she said, she had as many troubles as the next one, but she knew that problems held a resurrection hidden within them. When Jesus died, all looked black, but then three days later came Easter. “So that’s why I‘m happy,” she said. “I know the secret. When trouble comes, give God a chance – wait three days.”

We can allow an apparent defeat to turn into victory through trusting in the principle of resurrection. The time may not be a literal three days, but the principle is always the same. Nor, as the Bible prototype (Easter) was not a passive event, neither is this kind of waiting. Here too, something must be put to death, usually worry or trying to “do it yourself.”

Some years ago a friend of mine in Washington confided to me a kind of prayer she was saying for her son, then a boy of ten. “Already I’ve begun praying for that just-right marriage partner for Bobby. I pray for his future wife’s protection from evil, for her proper growth, both physical and spiritual,” she told me.

That was a new idea to me. But it struck me as so right that I acted on it. Each morning for some days, I worked on that creative type of prayer, which I had learned from experience, God delights to honor. I asked myself, “What would be the characteristics of spirit and mind and heart of that just-right girl for my son?” I was not so much concerned with whether she would be a blonde or a brunette; surely, the inner beauty would indicate the outer.

Item by item—quite specifically—the lineaments of my dream girl were put on paper. Most importantly, she would have met Jesus Christ for herself and would have fallen in love with Him. She would have a good mind, enough education for mutual intellectual stimulation. She would have a lot of the joy of life in here, a sense of humor, a certain zing—and so on.

Then when the portrait seemed complete, one morning I gave it to the Lord, asking Him to correct any flaws in it and bring it to fruition in Peter’s life in His own time and His own way. I buried it, as it were, as a farmer buries his seed, by placing the notes about my dream girl between the pages of the same favorite Bible.

In the years that followed it was difficult not to dig the seed up again and examine it as in time, a procession of girls passed through Peter’s life. Many were attractive; some would have been hard to accept. But the time of creative waiting came to an end when Peter John was in his middle year at Princeton Seminary. Her name was Edith.

 

Sometime after Edith and Peter were engaged I came across those written notes and reread them with amazement. There—detail by detail—was Edith. Of course, as always, God had thrown in a few extra goodies for dividends. She was tall, like Peter; blonde, like Peter; a wonderful cook—what man wouldn’t like that? She was strong physically, with joyous vitality. And she was interested in gardening and handicrafts and other hobbies which Peter enjoyed. I loved her immediately and have never stopped thanking God for such a marvelous answer to the mysterious, triumphant Waiting Prayer.

Excerpted from Adventures in Prayer by Chosen Books, 1975. Used with permission.