Experiencing God: Through Circumstances

"Experiencing God Through Circumstances"
Psalm 25:3, 5, 21; James 5:7-11


So far this chapter, "experiencing God through circumstances" has been one of my favorites.  Hopefully you will get a lot out of it, too.

One of the main themes is about not being in a hurry to understand what God is up to.

The purposes of God often develop slowly because His grand designs are never hurried. The great New England preacher Phillips Brooks was noted for his poise and quiet manner. At times, however, even he suffered moments of frustration and irritability. One day a friend saw him feverishly pacing the floor like a caged lion. "What's the trouble, Mr. Brooks?" he asked.
"The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't!"

I think we look at time differently than God.  We feel the fastness of times passing.  I'm finding that especially true now that there is much less time ahead of me than behind me.  My use of time has become all that much more important.  Why wasn't the use of my time this important when I was younger?

I know the ticks of the clock are going no faster now than they did when I was young.  But it seems like the hands of a clock are much more like the blades on a fan--I could cool myself by them, they are moving so fast.

Feeling now that time is much too short, I find myself more in a hurry to get a number of things done that I want to get done.  I am less patient.  I am more intolerant of waiting.

I don't know how God does it.  Maybe God is outside of time, and is not affected by the sense of how fast time seems to pass for we mortals.  I don't know, but God seems to be much more patient, seeing all of the long, long history that has unfolded out of the past, forever it would seem.

And there's the rub, as Phillips Brooks put his finger on it:  "...I'm in a hurry, but God isn't."

So, as we live out our circumstances, whether it feels like they are flying by, or creeping at a slug's pace, we are still restless to find meaning in those circumstances.  We want to know where they are leading, NOW!  We want to know what they are going to mean for us, right now!

But if we push too much, we'll miss something.  If we think the rose's beauty must have come to fruition with a closed bud and snip it from the bush, we will never see the opened flower and taste its fragrance.  The rose bud is the good.  The bloomed blossom is the best.  Too often, in our haste for life, we sacrifice the best for the good.

If we had only waited.  If we had only been more patient.

Even though Paul wrote to the Roman Christians that, "...we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good," (Romans 8:28), this promise doesn't say how long it will take God to work all that together.  God may take days.  Maybe years.  We can be sure that all will come together for good by God.  But how long?  Thus waiting becomes one of the main characteristics of the Christian life.  Waiting and patience takes us to the fulfillment of what God is up to.


Lisa Beamer reflects on the loss of her dad in her book, Let’s Roll.
Slowly I began to understand that the plans God has for us don’t just include ‘good things’, but the whole array of human events. The ‘prospering’ he talks about in the book of Jeremiah is often the outcome of a ‘bad’ event. I remember my mom saying that many people look for miracles--things that in their human minds ‘fix’ a difficult situation. Many miracles, however, are not a change to the normal course of human events; they’re found in God’s ability and desire to sustain and nurture people through even the worst situations. Somewhere along the way, I stopped demanding that God immediately fix the problems in my life and simply walk with me all the way through them.


But this waiting, this kind of patience, is not easy.  Usually this kind of patiences has to do either with events in our lives, or people in our lives.  When my patiences is being pushed with people, I try to imagine how patient God has been with me.  Patience with people involves being hopeful about them, not giving up that hope, and not letting that hope turn into bitterness.

There is a part of the opposite of patience that has to do with anger.  Patience is partly being slow to anger.  It seems impatience leads to anger, since things aren't going as fast as we'd desire them to or in the direction we'd want them to go.  All of that has to do the positioning of the self into the center, thinking that your self is more important than God's workings.

On the Andy Griffith Show episode "Man in a Hurry"- Malcolm Tucker is a wealthy businessman from Charlotte. One Sunday he happens to have car trouble a couple of miles outside of Mayberry. Malcolm walks the rest of the way to town and meets Andy coming out of Sunday morning worship.

Andy offers to assist Malcolm but warns that it is nearly impossible to get anything done on a Sunday in Mayberry. Malcolm begins to lose patience when Wally, the filling station owner, refuses to fix his car because it is his policy not to work on Sunday. Furthermore, Malcolm is dumbfounded when he learns that he can't even use the telephone because the elderly Mindelbright sisters use the party line to visit on Sunday afternoons, since they are unable to get around very well.

Back at the Taylor house, things don't get much better for Malcolm. He explodes into a tirade, screaming that the citizens of Mayberry are living in another world--that this is the twentieth century, and while the whole world is living in a desperate space age, the town of Mayberry shuts down because two old ladies' feet fall asleep.

Gomer informs Malcolm that his cousin Goober has offered to fix the car. Later, when Gomer returns with the car, Malcolm is surprised that there is no charge for the repair since it was just a clogged fuel line. Goober actually considered it an honor to work on such a fine machine.

As Mr. Tucker prepares to leave, he stops and contemplates the events of the afternoon as well as his return to the activities of his hectic life. Malcolm realizes that the very characteristics of Mayberry life that initially frustrated him so much are, in fact, the priorities he needs to establish in his own life. He decides to put his business on hold and stay the night in Mayberry.

We can all see ourselves in Malcolm Tucker.  He learned something about himself, and about life, that he wouldn't have if he didn't wait, and found some other, quicker, way out of Mayberry.  In our haste to get through our life experiences, especially the ones we have evaluated as negative ones, when things don't go our way, we explode!  And who do we get angry at?  Even though we don't name God, God is the one we are really angry with.  God is supposed to "work all things together for good" and right now, dang it!  What good is having a God, if that God doesn't do things like you want God to do them, and in the time frame you have determined is best?

Letting God be God, as God knows is best, in the time frame God has set out, is the faith work behind waiting and patience.   It is the trust that God knows what's happening in our lives, and is at work.

Do the math.  Think of just the people in Pratt.  God is doing for all of them, what God is doing for you:  "working all things together for good according to his purpose."  Every circumstance, every person in Pratt is facing is being worked on by God.  Now expand out to all the people in Kansas, the United States, the world.  It totally blows every breaker in my mind to think of all that God is taking care of.

And if we wait, and we are patient, it will all turn out as God is working it out to be.  But if our impatience, and eventually our impatient anger gets the best of us, we will not get the best that God has for us.


Waiting and being patient is tied to what true hope is.  If hope focuses on the future, the patience in hope is what happens in the present moment.  If we are hopeful for our future, the patience we have in the now will make the waiting easier.  If there is no hope for the future, being patient now will quickly turn to futility, despair and anger.

It may be the hardest lesson of all to learn how to wait on God, how to wait when nothing seems to be happening, and when all the circumstances seem calculated to bring nothing but discouragement.

We have certainly seen this in Men's Bible Study, as we are following the life of Paul.  Paul goes into city after city, preaching the gospel.  But just about every where he goes, he gets beat up for it.  Some times within inches of his life.

It would have been easy to just give in to despair, or give up on his calling and God.  Not a whole lot of people would slight him for it.  But he kept going, and wouldn't have known or seen the amazing work of God if he had quit.  He wouldn't have been able to come to the end of his ministry and say, as he did to Timothy, "I have fought the good fight, I have run the race, and kept the faith."

And if it wasn't for Paul, we probably wouldn't be here, we Gentile believers.  We owe our faith to him because he was patient, waited on God, and God saw him through.


Why would God not do the same for us, as we wait in patience to let all things work together, in God's time and way?