Faces of Beauty 1 -
all for Abba

~ Wait! ~

"Wait patiently for the LORD. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD."
(Psalm 27:14 NLT)

Waiting is so hard ~

Sometimes it seems like God is late, way late, in responding to our earnest requests.
We can be in such a hurry and can get frustrated if things don't happen quickly.
Recently I spoke with a minister who was in the middle of a building renovation project.
The project was going to cost more than they had anticipated.
They were short some of the funds needed to complete the work.
He went to the bank to fill out the necessary loan papers.
When he finished filling out the papers, he asked them to hold off for awhile on processing the loan.
He told them that the church was going to pray.
He even gave them a date of when he would be back.

Waiting is hard ~

That date came and they still didn't have the money that they needed, but asked the bank to wait
a little longer.
Then it happened.
Someone wrote a generous check that covered the whole shortfall.
The minister did what is so hard for many of us, he waited.
I recently heard a story about a young man who needed a car.
He couldn't afford one, at least not the payments of a car loan.
He prayed and waited ... for a short time.
But then, he grew anxious and went to a dealership.
He found a car he liked and they arranged a loan for him.
The problem was that he really couldn't afford the payments.
That Sunday after church, he asked some people to come out and see his new car.
Two men stood off at a distance.
One said to the other, "I guess he won't need my car now. I had an extra car
that I was going to give him."
If he had waited a little longer he would have had his prayers answered with a free car.

But waiting can seem so hard to do ~

When we think of Abraham being told that he was going to have a son, he believed God.
But there was a time later, when he grew anxious because it wasn't happening.
Rather than waiting for God's plan to be fulfilled through his wife Sarah,
Abraham resorted to having a child with his wife's handmaid, Hagar.
While acceptable in his culture at the time, it wasn't with God. It was a big mistake and
caused a lot of problems for the family then and for the world today! (Genesis 16 tells this story.)
Waiting is hard. Sometimes we get anxious. Let's pray and trust and look for God's timing.
Let's learn to wait so that we can receive God's best, God's way.
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(c) 2007 Mike Barres