Rodeo God

What is a faithful response to the waiting place? I suppose the answer is to wait. The reality of being in the waiting place, though, is that it is not that the answers are hard... it is that there are none. Elijah met God on Mount Horeb when he heard the sound of crushing silence. Crushing silence deafens the hearer and silences the speaker. Perhaps it is the labor pains of something about to be born, but this doesn't still the anxiety or calm the fear that, when it is all said and done, there will be nothing to show for it.

God has - over and over and over again - proven Godself faithful, yet each time we find ourselves in this place we wonder whether or not this will be the case. It's easier when it's a character from the Bible and not us.

Better to read about Abraham's doubts than to face our own.

Better to read about the Israelites creating their own gods when Moses took too long on Mount Horeb than to realize we, too, fashion our own gods when we think we have waited an inordinate amount of time.

Better to read about the disciples' failures to understand what Jesus was saying than to realize we continue to fail to understand.

Our stories are not so different. The narrative continues to be recycled, over and over again. I wonder if God ever gets sick of waiting for us to get it. Or if God has a twisted sense of humor and finds it hillarious that we poor slobs can't seem to learn from our mistakes and, like Sisyphus, continue trying to push the stone up the hill. For me, I think God's faithfulness rings more true when I see that this is not the first time God has had to deal with a broken creature. God smiles and says, "This ain't my first rodeo!"