What must it feel like to spend every day waiting? Just waiting. Not going anywhere, not keeping appointments, not concerned about a schedule, but just waiting. Waiting through interminable days and dark nights; waiting to be fed, to be turned, to be spoken to. What must it feel like just to wait?
Thelma Brown spent many months waiting. In her home, in a hospital bed, in a nursing home. Waiting. How did she do it? How could she do it? And what may we learn from her waiting?
When Thelma Harper was born in 1905, the world was a very different place from what it is today. She was born just after the beginning of the twentieth century, and her life span has reached almost to the end of the century. In that space of ninety years much has changed.
Oh, they didn’t think so at the beginning. In her birth year, 1905, a book was published which argued that, with the invention of the railroad train and the automobile, everything which could be invented had been invented, and that there would be no significant new advances in the twentieth century! Wow! How wrong can anyone be! Just about as wrong as the father of the Wright brothers, I guess, who did invent something new, the airplane, when their good preacher father insisted that if God had meant for people to fly, He would have given them wings!
Many things have changed since Thelma was born, and uppermost in my mind is the speed at which life is lived. We do think in supersonic terms now. Unthinkable in 1905. We do communicate instantly across the miles now, and the Internet measures the speed of its signals in milliseconds, as compared with the weeks it would have taken to send a letter around the world in 1905. The world has changed. It is in a hurry. We are in a hurry. And we have therefore lost the art of waiting. We have given up the gift of patience. We will not wait.
Just hesitate for a moment as the traffic light changes from red to green, and the driver behind you will show you what I am talking about. The mere fact that both he and you will get stopped by the next light down the road means nothing. He will want you to hurry up and wait! We have lost the art of waiting.
I used to have a poster on my office wall. The poster said, “The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get.” I don’t like to wait.
Not so Thelma Brown. She had learned how to wait. She had found that waiting is a spiritual discipline, a sign of spiritual maturity. And she will instruct us about this.
Who of us can imagine what it is like to spend endless hours confined to the bed, alone. Mobility gone, the powers of speech diminished, left alone with our thoughts and our memories. Waiting means being alone, totally alone. Or does it? Or does it?
The Scripture teaches us two things about waiting, two deeply spiritual truths about the art of waiting.
It teaches, first, that when we wait, we are demonstrating spiritual security. That when we wait, we are willing to wait for God to be God, and that we trust Him to do what needs to be done, in His own way and in His own time.
Paul says, "The creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God." I hear him saying that those who have learned to wait, those who can exercise the gift of patience, will be revealed as God’s children. Their true character will come out. They will be shown as spiritually secure.
Each time I visited Thelma Brown in the hospital, though her powers of speech were greatly diminished, and it wasn’t always possible for her to communicate what was in her heart, this much I did hear, and heard repeatedly: "Pray for my grandchildren." "Pray for my grandchildren."
What does this mean? In addition to the fact that she was devoted to her grandchildren, and, obviously, they were devoted to her ... in addition to that, it says to me that in these moments of waiting, what she knew best to do was to be a child of God. To trust God. To ask God to do what God does. And not to worry herself about things she could not manage.
Hear the Scripture again, as it speaks about what waiting can reveal: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." Who you really are comes out in the waiting process. What your character is all about comes out when you have to wait. And so who Thelma Brown was came out as she asked to be joined in prayer for her family. She had learned to trust God. She had learned to wait on Him, and not to be anxious.
You have said that she often repeated the opening line of the 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd." There is the spiritually secure heart, there is the one who can wait and be revealed as a child of God. The one who knows that the Lord, the Lord, is her shepherd.
But there is another meaning to waiting. There is something else we can learn from Thelma Brown about how to wait, something else from these Scriptures. And that is that waiting is not only a sign of spiritual security. It is also a sign of personal maturity. It is a sign of a person who knows who she is and what she stands for. She who can wait patiently not only waits patiently for the Lord, but also waits with a pure and secure heart, knowing that she has done what she could.
The Scripture says, "the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies."
In this complicated verse, I just pull this out: we wait for our freedom, we wait to be released from our inadequacies and limitations, we wait. We wait for the time to come when all the things we wanted to do and to do better we will be able to do. We wait for the moment to arrive when the boundaries of this life will be thrown back, and we will be given freedom.
This may sound a little trivial to some, but to me it was revealing. Each time I visited Mrs. Brown, though she was in a hospital bed, she would say, "Oh, I’d like to give you something to eat, but I just don’t have it. There’s nothing in the kitchen." Of course you and I know that she was confused about where she was, and I would assure her that I was quite all right. But she would go on to say, "Maybe you’d like a drink of water. I can give you a drink of water."
I say again, that may sound trivial, but to me it was a sign of a person who deep down knows that she will do the best she can, despite all the limitations, despite all the confinements. And then, having offered the best she can, she will wait, in confidence. She will wait, in personal maturity, because she has done what she could.
Again, her favorite Scripture, the opening of the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." I shall not run around wanting what I do not have and cannot get. I shall be content. I shall wait. I shall not want.
And so the creation and we groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, for the redemption of our bodies. "For in hope we were saved."
Today, the waiting is over. Today, the long nights are ended, and there is only daylight. Today, the limitations are loosed, and there is freedom. Today, the incompletenesses are become complete, the boundaries are wiped out, and all uncertainties are done away with. Today, wait on the Lord; and again I say, wait on the Lord, and He will renew your strength.
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
