As I was getting dressed the other day I was listing to Joel Osteen. During one of his wonderful sermons he was discussing waiting on God. As I was applying mascara I stopped as he said something along the lines of "God was on his way when you first prayed and asked for his help. He just had to get thru the evil to get to you". After he said that I thought a minute and pictured God fighting with the "bad" in life to get to me and fix my problem. It put a smile on my face to know that he is fighting for me and with that, I continued on with my day.
Well today while I was walking, what Joel said replayed in my mind and got me to thinking. I don’t know how many of you all have kids or have ever had to pick up a sick kid from school but boy it can be work. Picture it, you are at work doing whatever it is you do at work and then you get a call. The school nurse tells you that your child has, threw up, crapped or has a fever. Whatever the case maybe you now need to go to the school, pick up this sick kid and save the day!
So you finish what you are doing, tell your co-workers/boss and move as quickly as you can to get to your child. Once you are in the car you now have to deal with traffic which seems to be way worse than it is on a "normal" day. So it takes you 30 minutes to get to the school instead of the normal 15. Now this whole time all you can think about is how you want to get to your sick child in comfort them. While the child is lying down in the office thinking that you are NEVER COMING.
Finally you get to the school were your child looks at you and says "what took you sooooooo long!" A part of you wants to hit the little fart in the head because they have no clue what you have been through but you digress. Anyway, you pick up the kid, pick up some meds and off to home to comfort and help heal this child. The only problem you have now is that no matter how much medicine you give and no matter how much you hold your baby, they are sick until whatever they have passes. The medicine might help ease the pain and discomfort but the sickness is still present. But in due time the illness passes and your child is all smiles and back to life as they knew it.
I say all that to say I bet that’s how God feels when we pray. We get a problem and quickly make our way to the mainline and tell our father our issues. Like a good parent he hears our cry and quickly gets to work to help us but it takes time. He starts working on helping us the minute we tell him the problem but he has things to work against. Just like you he too wants to hurry up and "fix" whatever is wrong with his child but it’s not that simple. Normally he has to work through the people in his way and if you know anything about people you know that can take time! Then he has to finally get to us and work through our issues, which can take EVEN more time! As he is doing all of this work/fixing he is right there by your side giving you comfort. He is there letting you know that soon it will all be better. The same way you can’t tell your child when they will be better he can’t tell you when it will be better. Well he could but it really isn’t important. What is important is that you can and WILL be better.
I personally think we need to give God the patience and understanding that we expect from our children. We expect our kids to wait for us to pick them up and trust us to help them get well. We expect them to take their medicine and wait it out. When we have an issue we expect God to instantly show up and fix it! Then when he gives us "medicine" we normally don’t take it or spit it out. For example, the spirit could tell you that you need to forgive so and so to help you get your breakthrough. But instead of you doing it you simply ignore the spirit and keep right on with your whining and complaining, failing to realize that you are the one keeping you "sick". With our children we can hold them down and force feed the meds to them but God simply doesn’t do that. All he can do is sit and wait for us to get tired of being in our situation and do what he said. But like a good father he is still right there waiting to help make you all better.
So the next time you call on God and it doesn’t seem as if he is moving quickly enough, remember he has been on the way!
