Pastor Ryan Gaffney

I wrote an article last week about waiting. I want to tell you why I have such a bee in my bonnet about that messaging and how wrong it is.

It’s not just that I have been encouraged to wait around a lot (as you might expect) being told as a young person starting in ministry that I was too young for everything I was ready to do, and needed to wait around until i satisfied someone else’s criterion for minimum age.

It’s not just a personal concern. It’s also a pastoral one.

Me? Who’s me. I don’t matter, I’m weird anyway. But I have seen this idea impact my congregants negatively, sometimes fatally.

I want to tell you the story of my friend Rick. Rick was in his 50s when I met him, and he had not been active int he church for a long while, but he came by one day asking if he could borrow some tables. I fortunately was in the office and was able to help him, and through that small act of generosity a new friendship was formed and he started attending again.

Rick was young for his age, both in good ways and bad ones. He was vibrant and active, and a little immature. he had a drug problem early in his life and those sorts of things often lead to stinted development, but he was clean now and seeking to walk the straight and narrow.

Rick would often tell me about hos it had been his lifelong ambition to be a full time minister. To preach the gospel, and how, in the short term he hoped to start a mission ministry to serve the poor near him. I said that sounded great.

He also said, many times “You know, when I was younger I would sometimes get out ahead of God, and the preachers would have to reel me back in, get me to not go so fast” at one point I got kind of annoyed by this “god is really fast” I said “god is faster than you, you can’t outrun him” but he had been taught this enough times to internalize it.

”I have so much I want to do, so much God has left for me” he would say “I don’t feel like this is the end” Rick had terminal cancer.

He believed (bargaining) that God would keep him alive, because surely he still needed to fulfill all the promises he had made to god his whole life long, promises which he wasn’t procrastinating on, so much a piously and obediently waiting to be given permission to begin. The man was twice my age, with a year to live, and still hoping to get started at some nonspecific day in the future.

Rick became a deacon at our church, he served as a wonderful member. But he never got to become the preacher he could have been, nor start the mission, nor spread his art and his poetry beyond our little family. He waited too long

They will tell you to wait.

And wait, and wait.

If you grow up in the Christian church you will no doubt be told over and over again that you are not ready for things, that you should practice more discernment, and that it is a holy and laudable thing to “wait upon the lord” for the “appropriate time” to so any manner of things, and that in the mean time you need to simply be a religious consumer, and an attendee at whatever vague program they are currently looking for attendees for,

It is a lie.

It’s a lie from the pit of hell and it results in thousands if not millions of Christians who outta be out changing the world, instead sitting around trying to practice a nonexistant spiritual discipline.

That word, in Isaiah 40:31, the one that was translated “wait upon the LORD? It doesn’t mean that.

The original Hebrew word is קָוָה which means to be strong, to be tense, to be ready. Enduring, awaiting. The image is of a warrior with his sword drawn, because he is waiting for the moment to act within the next couple seconds.

It is the exact polar opposite of someone waiting around doing nothing, which is what the image conjures today. But in the early 1600s when the KJV was written, that’s what “wait” meant in English. It’s where we get the idea of a “waiter” as someone who serves. We are to “wait on the LORD” meaning serve him. A waiter is not someone who is idle. A waiter is someone who is standing ready to help and to serve, anticipating your needs, looking for anything they might be able to bring you.

But over time we grew to like the wrong meaning of that verse (it served the selfish needs of religious leaders) and now when new translations come out, they tend to keep that English word the same, even though the language has moved on and it doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.

Also, Jesus wasn’t a carpenter in the sense we know carpenters today. he was a carpenter in the 1600s sense. A builder.