David Waited

Do you ever feel like the things you are working towards are never going to happen? Freshman year in college and that degree is a four-year eternity away. Get a job and the pay raise that can pay for a house and a car is a ten-year eternity away. Someone gets pregnant and you have to wait a nine-month eternity to meet that new baby. A heat wave rolls through town and the promised cool front in a 24-hour eternity away.

It always seems like we are waiting for things to happen, for life to change. You make a decision, but you still have to fill out paperwork, wait for the start date, set things in motion before anything ever comes of that decision. Like me, deciding to enter Seminary, and classes won't even start for three more months. It feels like making that decision didn't make much difference sometimes. I'll have to wait before I start feeling any practical effect. Or take my sister and her husband. They want to be full-time missionaries, but now they are waiting for six months until they can raise enough support to make the trip.

We decide to do what we hope is God's will, and then we wait. So often it feels like things should move faster. I want results today. Then I look at David. The kid who used a sling and a stone to kill a giant, who was anointed as king and then spent years and years waiting for the throne.

Why did he wait? David didn't have to. Saul was trying to kill him because he was jealous. He set David on the run, made him wander in the wilderness, pursued him through the desert and sent him running into the arms of his enemies for shelter. No one would have blamed David if he'd taken control of his own destiny. After all, God said he would make him king. Why not kill Saul and be done with it?

But he didn't do it. David waited for God to make his move. He waited for Saul's time to be over and done, waited for Saul's own actions to catch up to him. He didn't let the desire for the throne, the desire simply to be free of that madman, get in the way of God's plan. God had anointed Saul, too. So David wouldn't touch him.

Abraham and Sarah didn't wait. They wanted to see the promise fulfilled, so when Sarah couldn't have a son she gave Hagar to her husband and Ishmael was born. It's not Ismael's fault, but the result was a lot more family dysfunction than would have happened had Sarah waited.

It can be hard, so hard to wait. Yet it is better to take David's path. He was, after all, a man after God's own heart. It may be the harder path, the longer path. But when we try to determine our destiny, make plans work out our way, we just get in the way.

David honored God first, and God honored him. Sarah tried to make things happen, and we still have dysfunction in the middle east.

I hate waiting. I get antsy and grumpy just waiting for ten minutes for my dinner to cook. But we need to learn how to wait. We need to cultivate patience. We need to let God take the lead and follow instead of stepping in ourselves and messing things up worse.

We spend an awful lot of our lives waiting. But sometimes, that's just what we need to do.