Isaiah 30:18, “Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.”
It’s been close to two months since April Fool’s Day yet I’m still finding paper eyeballs taped onto every conceivable item in my food pantry. There were other antics – our car keys sitting in an upside down glass of water (keys were in a Ziplock bag), faces of politicians taped over family pictures, and a roll of duct tape on the toilet paper holder. It’s as if they waited all year to enact their plans!
Like our creative daughters, God can’t wait to do what He has planned. For God is the perfect Waiter and He uses our waiting time to be gracious to us.
Isaiah 30:18 has been a constant encouragement to me the last few months as I feel the crunch of time we have left in the Sandhills before we make a major move. It’s been an excruciating season of grief as we say goodbye to our Sandhills family of twenty years and we wait to say hello to the new season into which God is bringing us.
Isaiah 30 starts out in verse 1 with, “Ah, stubborn children…” and there is a subtitle of “A Rebellious People” before verse 8. I’ve been both stubborn and rebellious with a tendency to chafe while I wait. What a striking contrast the LORD shows us:
One who waits to come alongside us in our need and show mercy.
One who is waiting to bring justice in our world and peace in our minds.
The One who calls us ‘blessed’ as we wait for Him.
My husband shared with our kids one night that God reminded him again of wrestling with the Lord 25+ years ago in the tractor, wanting to farm like his dad instead of accepting his heavenly Father’s call to be a pastor. He said with great emotion, “What if I hadn’t said that hard ‘yes’ and we missed the blessing of the last 20 years in the Sandhills?” None of us had a rebuttal; we’d rather cut off our right arm than to have missed the fruit of that hard yes.
Waiting to see the spiritual fruit of our obedience and labors is difficult. I think of those who’ve gone before in the great waiting line of life to see God’s promises yet never did in this life (Hebrew 11-12:2). They still witnessed the goodness of God. Waiting to witness His goodness- may that be my prayer!
