Random Thoughts: Waiting

I really liked the sermon last Sunday, so I've decided to do a short write-up on it. This will be the start of my Random Thoughts posts. If anyone has any random musings they wish to post up here, do drop me an email ;)

So the day before, which was a Saturday, my family and I were making a trip to Malaysia to visit some relatives. To our frustration, we got stuck at the immigration custom for a solid 4 hours. The waiting nearly killed us and brought out the worst in us. All in all, it was a terrible experience.

As Fr. Thomas Curran pointed out, most of us dislike waiting, basically because it renders us helpless. When we find ourselves having to wait, it's usually because we have done all we could and no longer have control over the situation. We wait because there's nothing else we can do; we are powerless to affect the outcome any further.

When we put God into the equation, waiting becomes a test of faith. Our attitudes towards waiting show in the way we pray. One would think that God, in all His power, would hear your request if you asked Him just once. Yet very often we pray repeatedly, asking again and again for the same thing, detailing when, how and what we want of God.

There's nothing wrong with asking God for things. In fact, it's a healthy form of prayer. But, as we have figured out in Lent, God is not a fairygod mother. He is not some magician who answers to our every whim. He is love, nothing more, and nothing less. Love functions in a way that logic cannot, and God knows us in a way that nobody else does. He understands our wants, but He also sees our needs, which we often overlook, and provides. All He asks of us is a bit of patience, and a bit of faith.

The worst thing about waiting is thinking. When there's nothing else we can do, and our prayers have been said, often we start to worry. We start contemplating the outcome, and we start building up expectations. We formulate the perfect fantasy setting where everything comes out perfectly, and wonder how terrible life would be if things did not play out that way. As we do this, we start leaving God out of the equation. Why? Because we no longer allow God to answer our prayers His way and in His own time. We start to have preconceptions on how our prayers should be answered, how our problems should be fixed, and ultimately, how God should act.

What we should do is ask God for the best possible outcome, whatever that might be. God will definitely answer our prayers; it's just a matter of when and how. We should do well to remember that it is a blessing to wait, because by waiting, we are atesting to our faith--and we are atesting to God's awesome love.