The Kaleidoscope of Time | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: The Kaleidoscope of Time | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marlene Bonney
09/05/18
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The room was dark, even though the drapes had been opened. Jeannette slowly chewed on the Meals-on-Wheels pureed dinner set on her lap tray. Her jaws worked slower than the caterpillar inching its way along the window sill crack where she slumped. The throat cancer radiation two decades previous had eventually turned her neck muscles into leather so that the brace under her chin additionally hampered her eating. Added to that, her esophagus had shrunk and she had to be cautious that the food would not aspirate into her lungs.

Jeannette was slowly starving to death. Her emaciated body was shriveling down to skin and bones, but she no longer cared. She had wanted the Lord to take her these past several months and she was impatient to get it over with. She had turned 81 years old the previous summer and, because she had refused the indignity of a feeding tube, her options were as sparse as the hairs on her son’s bald head.

“Please, mother, don’t give up,” her daughter had first pleaded with her three months ago when Jeannette had decided not to make the effort to get out of bed and get dressed.

In the end, she had acquiesced, realizing her grown children were not going to cooperate. But that didn’t keep her from telling the Hospice director or the visiting nurses, or her pastor, that she was impatient for God to take her home. Within a few months, of course, she did enter into His arms.

Was this reunion all the sweeter because of the waiting? We often don’t understand the why of things, but we do know that God is with us in the waiting. We see things from a narrow perspective here on earth—we just don’t know all the details—and only in hindsight are we sometimes able to realize His plan was worth the delay. We can see in Scripture from the beginning of time, examples of those who were forced to wait:

Noah waited over 100 years for something he had never even seen before—rain! Job suffered physical and mental anguish as He looked for God’s deliverance from his calamities. Abraham had to anticipate becoming the father of all nations for over 25 years before God fulfilled His promise with the birth of Isaac. Joseph, sold into slavery by this brothers, waited an additional two years in prison for the King to remember him as the dream interpreter. Moses survived in the Midian desert for 40 years. Jacob worked for fourteen years for his second bride, Rachel.

Over and over, we see the lessons these people learned and how they developed into stronger people from their waiting. That doesn’t make the journey any easier, but the outcome becomes worth the wait. I believe that, many times, our perspective is skewed because we are so accustomed, in this day and age, to instant gratification and so, on smaller scales, we daily face the petty annoyances of our age and times. Electronic devices and automatic quick responses have taught us we only need to wait seconds for, and instant answered questions at our fingertips. We are an impatient society, drumming our fingers on the steering wheel at a traffic light, standing impatiently in check-out lanes or nervously sitting by our phones for messages.

Like a child on Christmas morning who has waited for weeks to open presents, though, we appreciate things the longer we have to wait for them. We pray for the right job, the Christian spouse, the perfect house, the healthy baby; for healing, for deliverance. But we want them in our own time tables and these often do not match God’s ideas. I have also found that what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

I heard a story about a naturalist observing an emperor moth as it tried desperately to release itself from its cocoon. The young man, noticing the moth was having difficulty getting through the narrow neck of its prison-like covering, cut a slit down one side of the pupa case with his knife. The moth instantly came out, but it didn’t develop its striking colors and after a little while, it drooped and died. The naturalist concluded that unless the insect exerts itself to be free from its cocoon, its wings will not develop strength and beauty.

Only God knows the perfect time—and His sovereign will is worth the wait.

____________________________________

"The Lord is good to everyone who trusts in him,
So it is best for us to wait in patience—to wait for him to save us—
And it is best to learn this patience in our youth."
(Lamentations 3:25-27)

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