We Hate to Wait: Shedding Our Harried Self-Love

By Steve Shores

It seems that the only time we're not hurrying is when we're rushing. By the time we heed the calls of smartphones, iPods, iPads, emails, podcasts, downloads, app shopping, YouTubing, web browsing, posting, and responding to posts, we've ridden the amped-up hurry-train so far that we're lost. In fact, the last items in our list ("posting and responding to posts") sound so much like "marrying and giving in marriage" that we might well conclude that we are wedded to whipped-up drivenness. We need a fast from going fast. The gospel of Christ calls us to rest, but learning how takes time. We're invited to ease off the hurry-train and learn the pace of waiting. But waiting for what? To become a bit more like Jesus, who lived at a breathtakingly still point before the one who sent him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666790559

Steve Shores

Steve Shores is a licensed counselor, writer, happily married man, and gardener in Hickory, North Carolina. He is the author of False Guilt (1993) and Minding Our Emotions (2002).

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Introduction

To be human is to have a desperate, often-unfelt need to learn the rightness of waiting, because we live in a fallen world. I hasten back to the word unfelt, because the fallen-ness of our world comes with intense pressure to beat life into the shape we want. We are plunged into a river of hurry. Dallas Willard, putting things slightly differently, says that discipleship is learning not to have our own way but to be in the long obedience of learning to live in God’s ways. ¹ In this long journey, we urgently need to develop the capacity to wait, because we are trained to feel in our very bodies that time is short, that we should have immediate gratification, that we are owed this or that good feeling. We are schooled from our diaper days in demandingness, in impatience. If we see an outcome we want, we should (so the dominant culture teaches) go after it.

I just googled song lyrics that included the words why wait? By the third song, I was so disheartened that I quit the search. The overwhelming message was that there’s no point in waiting. Don’t pause to think things through; just close your eyes and jump off the cliff of desire. Why wait? Hurry, hurry, hurry! Life passes like swift fish across a porthole. So, a man decides it’s not worth waiting for the long process of working through the issues in his marriage. Maybe it goes something like this: We’re in love today. A few years later, out of love. A few years later, back in love but with someone new. We’re head over heels in love! Feels like forever love until the one we love actually falls out of love with us and finds a new love to love.²

My own father could personally sign that quotation. He fell out of love with my mother, his first wife of twenty-three years, fell in love with Mom’s best friend, had an affair with her, left his family, and married this second wife in a fever of self-discovery. A few years later, he fell out of love with her and fell in love with the mother of his second wife’s daughter-in-law, and she eventually became his third wife. Again, he was in a rush for self-discovery. Before he could fall out of love with her, he died.

After several years of parallel living with my mother, Dad had concluded he could wait no longer for real love. Ironically, he put off (waited) all his life to work through the real problems he had inside. What if, before it was too late, someone had said to him, You know that ache and anger in your soul that you’ve been waiting to deal with? You don’t have to wait any longer to work through that. There is a path to the other side of that pain. What if there had been an actual relationship that could carry that message to him? What if someone in his life had been willing to wait perseveringly to mature into the person who could bring that message to him?

This reminds me of God’s crying out in anguish, Why was there no man when I came? (Isa 50:2). It’s a question that expresses the Lord’s anguish that not a single Israelite had waited (and waded) through the process of becoming mature enough to join the Lord in redeeming Israel. There was no man when God came, because [Israel] said, ‘No, for we will flee on horses’ (Isa 30:16). Fleeing on horses pictures the quick-fix process of taking matters into our own hands. There’s a wise saying: If you want endurance, plant an oak tree; if you want quick results, plant squash. When adversity came, my father—sad to say—chose squash-hood. On the other hand, there were no oaks around him who sought to lead him toward waiting, growing, solidness. Why? Jer 8:6 speaks to this:

I have listened and heard,

They have spoken what is not right;

No man repented of his wickedness,

Saying, What have I done?

Everyone turned to his course,

Like a horse charging into battle.

The horse charging into battle depicts an urgent demanding of one’s own way. No one brought truth to my father, because he was surrounded by people who were too often doing what he was doing: taking matters into their own hands, seeking as many feel-good moments as possible.

Willard also says, Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.³ Why? Because God’s work in our lives moves along slowly—not because God is a slowpoke but because we are. It takes a lot of work—many starts and stops—to undo the flesh patterns of our lives and build maturity by the work of the Holy Spirit. God is patient, but we aren’t. We’re like spring-loaded babies going for the breast. There can be no delay! I recently talked with a young person who said, I feel that my smart phone has rewired my brain. I’m so used to having things and experiences at my fingertips, I can’t handle any delay. I’m totally impatient.

To take his point farther: I’m writing this on my computer, and an email notification pops up from Marriott Rewards that says, Steve’s August travel deals. I didn’t click on it, but I know it says something like Hurry and claim your chance to double your Marriott Rewards points by acting today! Just click on . . . Just after that, another email notification from Williams-Sonoma (from my wife’s wirelessly connected device) shouts at me to hustle up and get my 65 percent off without delay! A bookseller sends me an online notice of an eighteen-hour flash sale. And so on. Just typing these samples of hurry sickness goads me to hurry up!

I chatted with a fighter pilot years ago who told me: At the speed of sound, you have zero peripheral vision. Everything is a tiny dot in front of you. You’re looking down a cone into a tight focus. The faster we go, the less we can see the big picture. When Willard says to eliminate hurry, he’s promoting a slower, more restful pace that helps us develop the ability to discern God’s wide-screen, panoramic view. It’s worth the wait. We miss a lot when we rush from experience to experience, from sensation to sensation, from wave top to wave top. A cramped focus holds us in the straitjacket of hurried self-concern.

Waiting, then, coordinates with big-picture living. But waiting can too easily be linked to passivity, and that’s not how I’m using the term. The Bible presents waiting as a muscular trust in the living God. Why muscular? The endurance of long stretches of silence from heaven requires tremendous inner fortitude. Isaiah 21:11 has an arresting announcement that, in a literal translation of the Hebrew, says, The oracle concerning silence (author’s translation). Since this announcement comes in the midst of a series of oracles about God’s judging the nations, the later, Greek version of the Old Testament changes the reading from the Hebrew dûmāh (silence) to Edom. The Greek reading reflects confusion over the question How can an oracle, a spoken word, be about silence? In translating the word from Hebrew to Greek, an editorial decision was made to the effect that dûmāh (silence) cannot be the proper reading. It must the nearly homonymous Edom. But the later translators should have kept their nerve and retained silence. The gist of the prophet’s announcement is that sometimes silence from God must simply be respected. The watchman in Isa 21:11–12 has, in other words, nothing to report. His oracle really does concern a silence.

Why accord respect to God’s silence? Why not just get on one’s horse and ride off to make something happen? Because God’s silence never indicates God’s absence. A quiet God doesn’t mean a retired God. Essentially, the watchman tells the seeker, The night is still here. That is, there is as yet no sign of God’s being on the move. One commentator says, Isaiah imposed on his enquirer the bitterest medicine of all, the discipline of sticking it out.⁴ Sticking it out. Fortitude. Waiting.

Riding off on our horses, hastily doing our own thing, is actually a counsel of despair. While taking matters into our own hands may convey a can-do approach that makes us look bold and effective, the truth is we are often whistling past the graveyard. In our driven search for self-sufficiency, we suppress our fear of weakness, which is a hidden form of our fear of death, banishing it to the locked basement of our souls. But the fear wafts up through the floorboards, stampeding us to believe our only chance at fullness lies in this short, earthly life. Pressure begins to build, because we assume that it’s all up to us, and time is leaking away. We act as if we have more knowledge than we really have. When adversity comes, we proceed as if we know with certainty that God has bowed out and we have the field. While it can feel heady to have the field of action to ourselves, it’s actually an exercise in aloneness that we cover up with false cheer. We become skilled at bluffing, at saying to ourselves and others, I’ve got this.

Isaiah 57:9–10 conveys God’s searing, sad assessment of this self-sufficiency. The background to the passage is that Israel is threatened by enemies to her north and east. Rather than trust God, the nation turns to the southeast, toward Egypt, looking for an alliance that will protect her. She seeks human strength and blows off God’s promise of security and rest. To this, the Lord responds:

And you have journeyed to the king [of Egypt] with oil

And increased your perfumes;

You have sent your envoys a great distance,

And made them go down to Sheol.

You were tired out by the length of your road,

Yet you did not say, It is hopeless.

You found renewed strength,

Therefore, you did not faint. (Isa

57

:

9

–

10)

The length of your road’ reflects the long journey to Egypt with a caravan of gifts and blandishments to trade for protection. The debilitating journey sucks the life out of the travelers. Many of the ambassadors died along the way (this is the meaning of making them go down to Sheol"). Yet Israel’s leadership, shrugging off the death toll, refuses to admit the hopelessness of