Waiting On God (And A Yellow VW Squareback)

I am an impatient person.  I hate being on hold, am an habitual speeder on the road and have been known to leave an entire shopping cart of groceries if the store is missing a key item.  Compounding my impatience is my addiction to distraction.  The four person wait in line at a store is taken up by scrolling through Facebook, ESPN, The New York Times and whatever I can find to soothe my irascible soul.  Like any addiction, the distraction becomes habit and has seeped ever gradually into other areas of my life as I squander our most precious resource, time, binging shows and story-bouncing down the rabbit hole of internet only to look up and find the clock much further ahead than I had intended.

Where in this ecosystem do I therefore find the time to wait on God?

Much is written in Christian circles on seeking God.  On cultivating your journey with Jesus.  And I spent many years investing the majority of my spiritual time seeking Him, His will and my purpose in life.  It’s only been here, in my later years, that I have discovered the sacred value in simply being found.  “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) has resonated with me these past few years and in those rare moments that I have accepted that invitation I have been struck dumb by the experience.  I have reflected on it and the story of the Prodigal Son keeps calling to me for an entirely different reason.

My reflections on the Prodigal have always focused on a couple of different aspects.  The first is the response of the younger brother’s indigence and his father’s explanation of grace.  The second has been the father’s response to the wayward son, the extravagant display of celebration at his return as a guidepost to God’s response when we turn to him.  But what has taken me of late is the idea of the father running toward his Prodigal.  We often used that in Young Life talks as a way to explain God’s fervent desire to be reunited with us, His creation.

What has caught me, though, is a more subtle thought on that simple act of running.  Who knows if that Prodigal would have walked through that gate if his father hadn’t run to him?  Would he have simply stood and stared at what he had squandered, covering himself in a blanket of shame and simply wandered back out to the wilderness?  What strikes me is not the act of running as desire.  It is the act of running as remembrance.  Running to that wayward young man reminded the son of what he had always known in his soul: his father was seeking him, always.  All he had to do, really, was stop his endless distractions in gambling and excess and wait for his father to find him.  That he made the effort to find his way home was an added bonus.  His father running to him was proof that if he had simply stopped and been still, anywhere in the world and sent note to his father his father would have found him.  As the old hymn says, “I once was lost, and now am found.”  Not finding, a verb, but found, a noun.  Not a doing. A being.

So if we can know that God will find us if we will only wait on Him, why do we find it so difficult to do that?  We can blame our world and its endless distractions or blame ourselves for our endless well of impatience.  But those are the symptoms, not the disease.  And I think the disease comes down to trust.

Can we trust that if we are still and wait on God to find us, will he make the effort?  For far too many of us the answer is no.  That no is rooted in the failings of the people most important to us in our most vulnerable moments of development.  

For me, the picture I draw in my mind’s eye is of an nine year old looking out the window on a Friday afternoon.  My parents were divorced when I was six months old and it was acrimonious.  My father’s own childhood background could be its own book, but suffice it to say he was not equipped to be a father of three children and even less equipped to pursue those children as a weekend dad.  By the time I was nine my older brother and sister had long given up on him as an active part of their lives, but I yearned for that connection.  323-6880.  That was his home number.  543-2210 was his office.  I called those numbers enough times to remember them as I approach 60 by heart.  This was in the days before answering machines, so the phone would ring and ring and ring and ring.

On those occasions we would connect, I would work out a weekend that worked for him for me to come down from Everett to his home in the Montlake District near the University of Washington.  There wasn’t much to do there.  Dad and his wife, Judy, were into galleries and organic food and plays.  Snore.  And there was only one kid on the block my age, Dimitri, and his parents were divorced as well so finding that was a lottery, too.  But simply having time with Dad was its own reward, so I pursued those weekends with the effort I now use to pursue new clients.

So, to that nine year old on the couch, looking out the window, he was waiting for his dad’s yellow VW Squareback to meander down the road to his house to pick him up.  On more occasions than once, it never arrived, the light of an early spring afternoon gradually fading to dusk and with the onset of dark the stark realization that a weekend so anticipated was now dissipating into the pain of unintended but very real rejection.  The phone call usually came late on a Saturday morning, a work trip went late or a big project had appeared.  Maybe the weekend after next.

Is it any surprise that we have a difficult time waiting on God, when for so many of us waiting brought us only pain?  That the life lesson we drew from this and hundreds and thousands of similar and equally devastating disappointments was that we were on our own?  That to find joy and happiness required relentless effort to pursue?

In this light it’s no surprise that the seeking of God is what is so attractive about Christianity for a group of us.  We know only that that which we seek, which we scrap for is what we can hope to receive.  And yet at its core, this belief in seeking really runs counter to Luther’s founding concept.  We cannot earn God’s grace, it can only be received.  It is only in these later years, after the brushing and bruising and wearing and tearing that life inevitably brings that I have truly understood this concept of grace.

So here I sit, like that nine year old looking over the back of the sofa through the window to the road, waiting.  Trusting but not knowing that my God will find me.  All I have to do is want and wait.  He hasn’t disappointed me, yet.  He doesn’t always work on my schedule, but He works. If only I am patient and understand that the value is in the stillness as well as the knowing.