Are You Ready?

Waiting… I. Hate. Waiting.

Red lights? Of Satan. Waiting for an attendant at a self-check-out line? Demonic. Waiting 30 seconds for my son’s bottle to warm up? My God why have you forsaken me?! The spinning ball of death on my Mac? I might as well be dead.

I am an impatient person by nature. My guess is if you live in America, you are too. Waiting for red lights and the microwave are small daily annoyances. First-world problems really.

As I look around at the landscape of our culture, I have noticed we are growing more and more impatient with the big stuff of life. Look at the kids these days (I think I have enough grey in my beard to say that now)! They are practically applying to college before they are done with pre-school. Twenty-one-year-old college students expect to be making six figures the day after graduation. Startups expect to be sold for billions of dollars six months after they are founded. 

And the crazy thing is that the pace by which these opportunities are happening for young people is coming quicker than ever before. Most of the students in our church’s youth ministry are starting college with 2 years of college credit under their belt. Young twenty-somethings are getting high-paying jobs with the corner office. It’s not uncommon for a small startup to get swept up by some Google-type company within months of their app being developed.

I’m not saying this all bad, maybe I am just jealous.

As I have been thinking about this idea of waiting, I have begun to wonder if this new fast pace of success and advancement is robbing an entire generation of some valuable life lessons.

A few years ago I was growing restless. I was begging God to speed things up, to make stuff happen. My prayer was, “Come one God, get a move on already. I’m ready. Let’s do this!” The guy that was disciplining me at the time said, “Anthony, maybe you aren’t really ready. Maybe God is preparing you for something that you aren’t ready for yet.” I didn’t like hearing that at the moment, but as I sat with his words they started to get into my bones. His words changed my perspective. It forced me to do some self-examination. Was I as mature as I thought I was? Was I as gifted as I thought I was? Or were there aspects of my character that needed to be ironed out?

That change of perspective made me look at that season of my life through a different lens. Instead of trying to rush onto the next thing or spend my days wishing I was somewhere else in life, I tried to be intentional with the opportunities I had in front of me. How could I get the most out of where I was at that moment? What could I learn to make me a better husband, pastor, and friend?

If you look back on the great saints found in the Scriptures their lives are often marked by long seasons of preparation. Abraham, Moses, the nation of Israel all waited for seasons that were longer than the number of years I have been alive. Mind you, they weren’t the most patient people. They often tried to speed up the process. When they did this it made their lives more difficult. God often made promises he know they weren’t ready for at the moment. Their faith and character were often too fragile to handle what God had waiting for them years down the road. But it was in those long, often weary, years that God grew and strengthened their faith and character. He had to prepare them in their waiting.

Look at Jesus’ life. He spent 30 years living a normal life in a less than spectacular village. I don’t know how much Jesus knew about his future, but I can’t help but wonder if he saw those 30 years as a season of preparation. He trusted his Father with the timing. Jesus didn’t try to speed things up. He was faithful to the moment he was living in. He waited patiently. Then one day his crazy relative, John, came onto the scene announcing to the world that the Lamb of God had come to take away the sin of the world. At that moment Jesus was ready. It took 30 years, but he was ready.

Grace and peace ‘til we rise in glory.