waiting

"'The days are coming,' declares the Lord, 'when I will fulfill the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah.” Jer 33:14

It’s been a long wait. Hundreds of years since God told Adam he would send someone to crush the serpent’s head. Dozens of decades since He made covenant with Abraham. And yet, the people would wait another 500 years or so before Jesus would be born.

In this culture of instant gratification, where we would rather have debt than wait to own something, we’d rather have surgery than lose weight, we want to be managers right out of college instead of climbing the ladder, the idea of waiting half a millennium is appalling. 

But God’s timing is different than ours, and His timing is perfect. I need to remember that as life makes me wait. My house is taking way too long to build. We just got snow, and the months of winter loom like a tiresome chore. If I could, I’d fast forward through half of my life.

Jeremiah reminds me today that what I’m really called to is living faithfully in the not yet. Even my new home and the coming spring, once they get here, are part of not yet - not yet sanctified, not yet glorified. Not yet who and what I will be once I pass through the transition of death.

Like the Israelites of old, like my grandkids hefting the Christmas presents, I live in anticipation. My whole life will be lived in anticipation. There is a much better place than this, and I have a reservation. It seems a long way off.

But, God promises, the day is coming.