Production and Patience

I find myself torn between two poles.  On the one hand I feel strongly that we are engaged in a battle and that we must be zealous and active in the fight.  On the other hand, I know that God is sovereign and is in control of all things. I was thinking and praying about this as I walked on the beach the morning.  I was feeling SO burdened by some specific situations.  I was moved by the immediacy of the problems and was interceding.  I was begging God to bare His arm and win the victory.  I was on the verge of despair that He could do anything, or would do anything, when I noticed the action of the waves.  The tide was going out, so the waves were not crashing, but instead gently rolling up and down between the rocks and over the sand.  I noticed that the rocks were well worn; some had taken on impossible shapes beneath the steady motion of the waves.  I saw the sand being pushed up and down the beach by the surf.  I saw small pebbles rolling around beneath the water, on their way to becoming sand themselves. It was then I was reminded of the inexorable coming of the Kingdom of God.

God is moving and His Kingdom is coming, but all in His own mysterious time and paradoxical ways.  I feel such an urgency an impatience for God to move!  I want His Kingdom to come and His will to be done NOW!  I don't think this is all bad, but I see that our sense of urgency and activity often leads us to make subtle choices that lead us away from dependence on God.  It seems that what we want is results, people saved, children fed, schools built, churches planted, families transformed, or cultures redeemed.  Being heirs to the industrial and information revolutions, we then set out to design and build systems that will efficiently and effectively produce the results that we need, that we believe God wants to see happen.

Unfortunately, our reliance on these systems and our efforts to perfect them often causes us to lose our way.  Ultimately our goal is not the production of particular results, good though they may be, but rather, as Jesus taught, God's Kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.   The reign of God is massive!  It is much bigger and more complex than we can imagine.  We understand very little about the universe we live in, and even less about the God who created it all.  His Kingdom is mysterious and even paradoxical.  It has so many aspects, contains so many interactions, and has so many simultaneously moving parts!  It is organic and dynamic, it cannot be placed under a microscope and dissected to unlock the secrets.  When we attempt to do this, we reduce the movement of the Spirit to the distillation and application of principles.  We lose the life of the Spirit, but we gain the illusion of control and efficiency.

Oh, but we are an impatient people!  The movement of God sometimes takes much longer than we would expect.  The waves are an ineffecient way to shape stones and to make sand.  So, we devise machines.  We research, discover, and apply the laws of physics and harness what powers we can to accomplish our goals.  We are efficient and effective as we improve upon God's methods.  We never equal His grace and beauty, but no matter because we can do it faster.  Unfortunately, there is more to what God is doing with the waves than just making sand, more than we can possibly understand.

When we skip the process to achieve the end we end up missing both.  We can produce sand and gravel from stones, but that is only a small part of what God is doing; one small part of His grand design.  The marvelous interactions of all that is happening on the beach are part of an intricate dance that we can pick apart but never duplicate.  Behind it all is the hidden hand of God.  He calls us to enter in with Him and to take an active role, but also not to overestimate our own prowess or importance.  We are each like one wave on the beach.  We matter, we have a role, but it is all so much bigger than us.  So, we must take our part in the line of waves accomplishing the will of God by measures and asking Him to give us both the patience and the endurance to keep going.