When God Moves Slowly

A friend of mine asked recently if God was ever going to answer a particular prayer. I answered with a quote from Tom Petty that "the wai-ai-aiting is the hardest part" and said something about God moving slowly to create change in our lives. That sounded pithy at the time.

Hours of mindless tasks later, I recalled something I'd read from Frederick Buechner in The Sacred Journey. He writes about the obfuscation of God's speech into our lives, saying, "God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves."

It took me a while to find the quote, but I finally dug it out. Maybe the search was a kind of metaphor for my own spiritual waiting and searching - part hazy memory, part dim epiphany, part grubbing about in my library. As I consider all my own "waits" and all the "waits" of others, I think the waiting is part of the process of finding meaning in God's speech, the speech that becomes effective "only when we ferret it out for ourselves."

But couldn't God do things in an easier way? Just a little quicker, playing things out nice and clean, like a thirty minute sit-com?

But really, who am I to judge God's speed and efficiency? God's economy holds little similarity with my system of skewed values and prejudices, anyway, and besides that, there is that other little nagging thing that just may be an absolute truth: God's ways are not my ways.

I do hold hope for the future, though. One day there will be a kingdom where things like mustard seeds, yeast, pearls, workers in vineyards, the meek, the poor, those who grieve, all these things, they will come to a place of prominence and the human economy will emulate God's economy. I'm ready for that day.

But since I don't see it on the horizon, I'll simply wait, just like I told my friend to do. And I'll hope for continued dim epiphanies and ghostly memories all grubbed out in the room I call my study while God moves slowly all around me.