Click bait they call it, shiny, enticing online information that demands you and I check it out, now, right now! My phone pings insisting that I dump what I am doing and pay attention to some unmissable bargain or trivial fact. There is no doubt, our world is infected by a data-driven attention deficit disorder. We are the most distracted of people. We find it impossible to sit with a word or a phrase and allow it to percolate deep in our souls.
If you have even made it this far into this blog your concentration will have already been mightily contested, well done! So, Psalm 130 is a bit of a hammer blow to those of us who find we have the attention span of a fruit fly.
Psalm 130 says:
I wait for the Lord
More than watchmen wait for the morning
More than watchmen wait for the morning
This is not our scripture for this Sunday. It is posture for every day! Learning to wait on the Lord is to learn to live by faith in a world caught between the cross and the kingdom coming. It is to realise that God’s Kingdom comes, not by sheer force of nature or frenetic activity but, by living in alignment with his will and seeking and expecting his power and presence breaking in.
Psalm 130 gives voice to a hungry soul. When hungry physically, emotionally, relationally or spiritually I want to grab something now and gulp it down. I am conditioned for a sugar hit recovery, not for waiting.
Here’s the thing. The psalm reminds us, that God’s way is to wait! And the way to God is to wait.
I find that hard, to be honest. I want all the kingdom of God right here right now. I want God to make himself fully known, people to be fully ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven and the planet, its people and its conflicts repaired. And, by the weekend if you please.
The fullness of the kingdom is coming, for sure! It is the waiting that gets me. I can unplug from external action and pressure but find my soul is still churning and my brain is on a fast spin cycle.
I think we miss this when eliminating hurry from our lives and finding a liveable lifestyle. We attend to our diaries when we need to address the hurry that infects our hearts. Time management may be a necessary first step. However, a life of waiting on God is not so much about managing external busyness but finding internal steadiness.
Why am I so disturbed within me? He asks.
Indeed! You find me doom-scrolling through the pages of my soul rehearsing the worst possible scenarios and franticly working up solutions to problems real and imagined, fearing that unless I jump in, and act things will fall apart. A harried and hurried soul is an indicator that I am not living by faith.
I am not putting my hope in his word.
“Waiting,” says Andrew Root, “Rests squarely on hope coming from a horizon outside of us “
Waiting is an act of faith, of wholehearted trust in our coming King.
To wait is to be continually saying “Come Lord Jesus”, to be constantly expecting his intervention in our days, to be listening for his voice, to be expecting him to work even as we make ourselves available to him. It is not to abdicate responsibility but to choose to seek and trust his way forward.
Psalm 131 tells us that there is a place where our souls are satisfied in such a way that rest fuels our frantic days like a child who has been well fed.
“Put your hope in the Lord, now and always,“ it says.
This is to wait on the Lord
Iain