Why All This Waiting? : Part 4

When God Waits: Making Sense of Divine Delays
by Jerome Daley

(Page 4 of 4)

"I'm fine." "Things are going fine." "The kids are fine." "Work's fine." And church? "Yeah, church is fine."

Okay, so sometimes we do find ourselves in the domain of fine - things aren't great, and they're not terrible. Life is just okay. But the trouble comes when fine gets too comfortable and we don't want to leave. We choose the perceived safety of fine over the honest tally of our life: "Much of the time my life feels simply hard and broken, but occasionally God brings me into moments of incomprehensible transcendence and is preparing me, I know, for things too wonderful even to give words to."

But I admit that when Kellie and I began setting up our new life in Greensboro, fine was a pretty fair assessment of where we were. I frequently found myself in the place of feeling emotionally skinny. Unwilling to verbalize my frustrations with God and sometimes unwilling to take my dreams out of their box and gaze at them again. It was easier to truncate the parts that lay furthest from my control: the extreme bad and extreme good. Fine would do fine.

But the willingness to be brutally honest about our current condition is the very quality that legitimizes our grandest dreams.

As Kellie and I left our friends at the beach, we struggled to wrap words around our conflicting emotions. Sometimes the dream was compelling - exciting us even as we continued to wait. At other times we lost heart. But ultimately we were committed to walk the road before us, so we reached again for the grace to wait well. Waiting Well: Hannah Pursues a Destiny

Hannah's dream was to have a son - not so remarkable as dreams go. But as ordinary as it was, it remained unfulfilled (see 1 Samuel 1:1-2:21). And as she longed for her stomach to grow, the only thing that grew was a gnawing emptiness ... an emptiness that became a raging hunger inside her. And on the outside she endured the daily taunts and snubs of the "other woman" in her husband's life. Elkanah had two wives, which unfortunately was not un- common in ancient Israel, and Peninnah had child after child while Hannah had none.

Her grief and shame overflowed her soul until one day she entered the house of the Lord and collapsed in tearful entreaty, wordlessly mouthing her heart's cry to God. Despairing, yet at the same time unwilling to let go of her hope, she held her destiny before the Father once again. I can almost hear her anguish: "Lord, you know I was created for more than this! Satisfy the ache inside me, and fulfill your calling on my life. Don't let the seasons pass me by and leave me desolate! Make good on the hope you have placed within me. Give me a son! He will belong to you all his days" (see 1 Samuel 1:10-11).

Who knows how many years Hannah had laid such a petition at God's feet while she waited and prayed. Prayed and waited. Perhaps after five or six years her hope grew faint and she even stopped praying. But the dream didn't die. Maybe it emerged a couple of years later with fresh resolve or desperation and drove her to the house of the Lord on the day that Eli the priest observed her travail. The birthing of the dream in her soul was more exhausting than the birth from her body, which came in eventual answer to her waiting. The right dream, rightly held, will always be rightly fulfilled, even if the wait is long and hard.

Surely Hannah must have wondered, Am I a fool to keep hoping and waiting and looking? Maybe I should just accept life on its own terms and forget this foolish vision. Instead, she nourished her hope and stewarded her vision until God answered. And the result of her determination to hope and wait was not only her own redemption as a mother and wife but also the redemption of a nation in sore need of a godly leader. This seemingly ordinary desire - a woman longing to have a son - was in fact a destiny so large it's hard to fathom even in hindsight.

Hannah's son, Samuel, served God wholeheartedly from the time he was a small boy in the Temple until he was a very old prophet. He lived for God both while he served Eli the priest and while he served as God's mouthpiece during a time in Israel's history when the people weren't much for listening. Eventually he set the stage for Israel's greatest leader, King David, to replace one of its poorest leaders.

God used Hannah's years of hope and tears to deliver the baby who would grow up to be one of Israel's most important prophets. As wonderful as our dreams appear to us, we don't usually see the larger picture of how the fulfillment of our destiny intertwines with the destiny of many others. None of us lives in a vacuum. Our callings affect hundreds and even thousands of other lives - for good or ill - depending largely upon our willingness to endure the weakness of waiting, to go the distance, and to obtain our God-given future!

Copyright © 2005 by Jerome Daley.

About the Author

Jerome and Kellie Daley cofounded oneFlesh Ministries after serving for ten years as worship pastor and leader of women's ministries in a local church. Through oneFlesh, they call people to pursue a life of intimacy with God and one another. Jerome is the author of Soul Space and When God Waits. He holds a master of arts in New Testament from Columbia Biblical Seminary, and Kellie holds a master of arts in educational ministries from the same institution. The Daleys live in Greensboro, North Carolina, with their three children.