Rev. Katie Montgomery Mears

Proverbs 14:29 NIV

Whoever is patient has great understanding,
but one who is quick-tempered displays folly.

Reflection:
When someone tells me I’m going to have to wait on something, I go to a negative place pretty quickly. I hate inefficiency and slowness and, unfortunately, I’m a pretty awful version of myself at the DMV. 

But here I am, 8 months pregnant, and pregnancy is all about waiting. At the beginning, it’s about waiting until the right time to tell people the good news. And then waiting for the sickness to pass. In my case, that was 26 long weeks of waiting, much of it spent sitting on the bathroom floor next to a toilet.  We wait for results from tests. We wait for reassuring kicks that tell us things are okay. 

You’d think with all of that waiting that I’d be more practiced in patience. But the truth is that I am an eyes-on-the-prize, how-quickly-can-I-get-there type of person that struggles with impatience. 

And then I am reminded that trying to hurry things along or jump ahead – skipping the insomnia, exhaustion, and labor – means missing time the baby needs to grow, to develop, to become a healthy infant.  

We often long for the same speedy result in our spiritual lives – we want to skip ahead to the part where we are fully-formed followers of Jesus. We want to be spiritually mature, but we don’t want the discipline it requires of us.  But just as God is using each (long) day of my pregnancy to help this baby grow, God uses each of our days to help develop patience in us.  

Instead of trying to rush through the seasons when it feels like we aren’t making progress forward, we need to purposefully still ourselves and look to God. When we choose to spend our time in spiritual practices, actively pursuing God through prayer and reading scripture, we are more likely to find ourselves in alignment with God’s timing. 

Prayer:
Loving God, it can be so hard when I feel like we are desperate for something to come to pass. I know that you care for me so much and that your timing is perfect, but my human nature wants to be in control. Help me to slow down and turn to you instead of trying to micromanage it all. Amen.