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Meditation 8

Divine Layover

He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”

—Genesis 15:5

Are you willing to wait?

It was the longest layover I had ever experienced in flying. For a season, I traveled to several parts of the Orient, and on a flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong, we stopped in Taipei, Taiwan. Once we landed, we were told that our ultimate journey would be delayed for an undetermined amount of time. I had been waiting a long time to travel to Hong Kong. Though my friends and I knew we would ultimately get there, the wait, perhaps over half a day, was at times unbearable.

Layovers are a common part of travel; in fact waiting is part of making almost any journey. Since we have yet to invent viable transporters (à la Star Trek), nor can we travel at light speed (á la Star Wars), our journeys—whether from our house to a friend’s, from one state to another, or from one continent to another—begin and end with some form of waiting.

There is a lot of waiting in the stories of scripture . . . a lot . . . there is almost always a huge span of time between a promise God makes and the fulfillment of that promise. Whether it is Moses delivering the Hebrews to the Promised Land, Mary delivering the Lord of Life, or Jesus putting up with the endless squabbles of his own disciples, it just seems to be part of God’s modus operandi to expect his followers to learn to live with the gift of waiting.

Before God renamed him, Abraham went by the name Abram. Abram and God were tight, as we might say today. They were very close; they talked, it seems, as you or I might talk to a good friend or a family member. For a long season, Abram carried a heavy heart that he may not have children. He was sad that should he die, not his blood kin, but a servant in his household would inherit his possessions.

In the midst of all of his fretting, God had Abram go outside, look up into the heavens, and look at the stars. “Take a look,” God said, “Don’t worry . . . your offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the sky!”

In the next meditation, we will take a look at what God might have really meant with that promise, but for now, let’s agree that it was a promise worth holding on to for good old Abram. In the story that follows, we do see that there was a long wait, a kind of divine layover, between this promise and its fulfillment. Sometimes Abram waited patiently on the Lord, and other times he did not. He lost faith; he tried to control the circumstances so that the promise of the Lord came to be not on God’s terms, but his own.⁹

It is hard to wait sometimes. Our world is one of instant gratification in virtually every form, but our ways are not God’s ways, and clearly the antibiotic to our frustration with God’s divine layovers is patience. Evelyn Underhill reminds us, “Patience with ourselves is duty for Christians and the only humility. For it means patience with a growing creature who God has taken in hand and whose completion He will effect in His own time and way.”

Such patience, however, requires trust—trust that what God has promised, or what you have prayed for, will in time be met with an end of God’s making. If it is God’s end, then whether your layover is longer than you thought or takes you to places you did not expect, it is still the right end of the journey.

If you entrust your hopes and your journey to God, is not the end something for which the wait is worth enduring?

We did eventually make it to Hong Kong. Once we got there, it was more exciting than I could have imagined. It was worth the wait, the diversion, the layover. Perhaps that is often, if not always, true of waiting!

A Bit of Heaven

Consider something for which you are waiting. A relationship to heal? A work situation to improve? Word from an old friend? News from the doctor? Why not give way to the waiting not as an intrusion, but as an opportunity to trust even more the One who is our perfect end?

A Prayer

O God of peace,

Who hast taught us that in returning and rest we

shall be saved,

in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength:

By the might of Thy Spirit lift us,

we pray Thee,

to Thy presence,

where we may be still and know that Thou art God;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

—The Book of Common Prayer, p. 832

9 When Abram’s wife, Sarai, did not become pregnant within Abram’s timetable, Abram chose, at Sarai’s suggestion, to sleep with a maidservant from his household named Hagar. Hagar did become pregnant with a child, but the trouble that arose out of the conception, and ultimately, the birth, of Ishmael was a heavy burden in Abram’s household.