Waiting

Hello everyone! I have been pretty sick and unable to keep up with the blog for a few days, but i'll try to catch us up! Here is a devotion I get e-mailed from my campus ministry program. ~Erin

E-mail BIBLE STUDY “Moved by faith in God.”
But those who wait for he Lord shall renew their strength,

They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40:31

A social activist, Leonard Woolf wrote of his life’s work: “I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the past 57 years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played ping pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make the rather ignominious confession that I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.”[1]
Jesus was much younger when he cried out on the cross, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” But whether we are young or old it is possible for the world to “get to us.”
After we have given the world around us our best shot no good seems to come from our effort.
As students we sometimes work hard to prepare for an exam only to get a terrible grade.
After four to six years of university work there is no employment waiting for us.
As parents we do our best to raise a child only to have the child turn against us and spurn our values.
Martin Luther King worked for civil rights and nonviolence only to be brought down in violent assassination.
Jesus came to earth from God indicating how God so loved the world, only to be crucified!
In America it is easy to believe that life should have comfort, luxury and convenience. The reality is that life can also be cruel.
Does our Christian faith help us with our feelings of futility?
The verse for today from Isaiah says, “But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” This is a hard word for those of us who want the pain to be gone NOW. We remember that Jesus was in the tomb for three days. I think of this as a way of “waiting for the Lord.” In spite of the miraculous power which Jesus exhibited in his earthly life, still he lay in the tomb doing nothing. If Jesus waited upon the Lord, surely we must wait too.
This word from Isaiah has proved itself many times in my life, but there is more to the wait than the promise that we shall mount up with wings, run and not be weary and walk and not faint. We also wait for God to being all history together. A Hebrew Testament scholar, T.C. Vriezen believes that “God holds history in the hollow of His hand, and that He will make the history of the world end in complete communion between God and man, so that He will come as King; or, in other words, so that He may be all in all.”[2]
Here is the difference between humanism and faith in God. Yes, human effort is needed, but by faith we enter into a promise and power that goes beyond all that we can do. Thanks be to God, but Lord help me to wait.[3]

Yours,
Ron Erickson

[1] The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An autobiography of the years 1939-1969 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), p. 217.
[2] An Outline of Old Testament Theology (Boston: Charles T. Branford Co., 1958), p. 371.
[3] Many of the ideas in this meditation are inspired by Ernest T. Campbell, Locked in a Room With Open Doors (Waco: Word Books, 1974) p.113 ff.

God Bless,
your sister in Christ~Erin