The Waiting Place

2015 has been a waiting place for me.  I don't know about you, but I don't like waiting places.  After Matthew moved back to his birth mom in January, we decided to wait until Adel started his second semester of his Master's courses before we tried to find a new possible foster match for us.  Then, right about the time we would have been open to foster kids again, we followed God's undeniable call on us to move and downsize.

That move has been a huge blessing and we love our new home and our new neighborhood.  Contrary to what I thought before we moved, I feel that our new home is actually better equipped for our future kids than our old home was.  After feverishly getting settled from our move, we waited until Abby felt settled and happy in her new school.  Now we are waiting until our family (grandparents, my mom, and my sister's family) goes on the cruise we have booked for Thanksgiving week (yay!).

I had not realized how much I was just going through the motions of my walk with God until a few weeks ago, and until more of the pieces dropped together this morning. A few weeks ago, I noticed my relationships with others were out of whack.  Greater still, I noticed a great longing in me that I can only describe as the awareness of a disconnect with God.  Not that He had left me, but that I had strayed, ever so subtly from intimacy with Him.  I began to slow, to not just rush through the morning reading of His word, but to seek, longingly for His message to my heart.

I have walked on both sides of that narrow path so often, between the mindless legalism of spiritual routine and the passionate communing with a personal God, that now it is much easier for me to see and feel the difference, at least once I'm back in line with Him. As I began to truly, prayerfully seek Him, He drew near to me again and has been slowly opening my eyes to the way He sees my circumstances and my heart.

His message to me started with a Sunday message about work and just going through the motions rather than working for the Lord.  Yep, doing that.  The Sunday following that one, I felt like I did when I was newly hired to run the children's ministry: humble and aware that it was much bigger than I could ever manage, ready to simply let His love flow through me to the parents, volunteers, and kids who crossed my path.

Then He gave me a clue in my morning devotional time.  I am in the not-so-interesting part of the book of Joshua, where the land is being divided up between the tribes (yawn).  As unlikely as a personal message could be found there, God spoke.  Joshua 17:14-18.  The children of Joseph are whining to Joshua about their puny inheritance since they were "a great people" (Their words. In other translations it is "numerous" people, but "great" is so much more fun to make fun of).  Joshua tells them If they are a "great people," and if the mountains they inherit are not enough for them, they can have any land they can win from the Canaanites in the valley.  With his use of if, I feel a little eye-rolling in his reply.

The children of Joseph then tell Joshua that the Canaanites of the valley have chariots of IRON.  Maybe it's because I have kids, but this sounds so whiny to me!  I hear them in a whiny voice: "But Joshuaaaaaa, they have chariots of IRON!"  In their defense, as foot soldiers, I can see that chariots of iron would be pretty scary.  Joseph's response to them is that they can have more land for their numerous tribe: "but the hill country shall be yours, for though it is a forest, you shall clear it and possess it to its farthest borders. For you shall drive out the Canaanites, though they have chariots of iron, and though they are strong.” (Joshua 17:18).  In his response, which simply repeats his first command to them (as any good parent of whiny kids would do), Joshua tells them to get down into the valley and face the chariots of iron.

As I read this, I noticed the exchange as unique among all the land-distributing that was going on.  This was exceptional because Joshua was requiring the children of Joseph to fight for their own land against a formidable foe.  As much as they sound a bit like whiney-behiney's I felt that they had a decent claim to whine.  Why was everyone else handed land already conquered and this tribe had to fight on foot against iron chariots to claim their promise?  That's where I left it, just a mental note in my morning reading, until my devotional reading today brought it all home.

This morning I was reading My Utmost for His Highest, a daily devotional by Oswald Chambers.  Today was one where God used Chambers' words to reach out and squeeze my soul.

What first caught my attention with this devotional was that it describes the difference between the soaring mountaintop experiences with Christ, and the daily drudge through the valley of humiliation.
The second thing that caught my eye was that it was about a passage God had used to speak to be a year ago (see Christ's Mission, which is kind of hilarious...or humiliating...because it's pretty much the same message as I received today).  But what really grabbed my soul was when it asked, "what about the thing that is a humiliation to you right now?" I thought about it for a moment and then, wham, I realized my humiliation was my waiting place.

When you make a big mountaintop announcement like, "we're going to adopt" and then you don't...for a year...and the foster workers are wondering if you're really in it, and friends you know who started after you are getting placed with children before you, and there's so much uncertainty and doubt about the calling and the future of this crazy plan, I'd say that's humiliation.  I don't mean, and I don't think Chambers means, humiliation as in embarrassment.  Rather I mean it in the sense of knock-you-to-your-knees humbling.  The waiting place is humbling.

But the waiting place is what it's all about.  As Chambers says, "The height of the mountaintop is measured by the dismal drudgery of the valley, but it is in the valley that we have to live for the glory of God."   Yes!  And how that helps my heart while in the waiting place and the drudgery days.  This is the living out of the calling, the waiting and the working and the struggling toward the mountaintop vision.

That's when God brought me back to the passage in Joshua 17.  The children of Joseph are me!  Given the vision and carried only so far as the border of their inheritance, they have to work to gain the promise while others are given their promise before them.  Like them, I have been grumbling about the work of trudging through the valley, of packing and unpacking during a move, of Master's classes and ministry challenges and foster training classes, of waiting for the right time to claim the vision God had given me.  And, ugh, how much have I thought myself "great" that I should expect God to deliver the right children to our family at the time of my choosing?

As if to knock it all home, while I was even writing these words, God struck me through the words of a song that's playing on the radio (Abide by Jenny and Tyler): "The labor of God is to trust in the Son."  I have been wanting so much to get to the labor that God has set before me of adopting children that I have forgotten and forsaken the true labor of God, simply trusting in the Son.

What a beautiful and empowering reminder to trust in the Son in the valley of waiting.  Do I trust Him with the vision, with the timing, with my family, my hopes and dreams?  Do I trust that He has me right where He wants me at this moment?  Will I follow Him through the valley?  When you put it like that, the answer is of course yes, and thus only by trusting in Him, my strength returns to do so.   I am in awe of God's great love for me that He would encourage me when my heart can be so very far from His.  He is so good.  He is worthy of trust in the waiting place.