Biography
Dr. Lewis Smedes is an author, former seminary professor, and clergyman in the Reformed Church of America. For more than twenty-five years, he was a Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He has written many books, including Forgive and Forget, Caring and Commitment, and How Can It Be All Right When Everything is All Wrong. He's retired from full-time teaching, but continues to travel as a visiting preacher and to write from his home in Sierra Madre, California. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"The Wisdom of Waiting"
I want to talk with you today about something that all of us have to do a lot more of than we want to do. Nobody likes to do what I'm talking about because I'm talking about having to do nothing, nothing, nothing but wait. So let this be our first thought.

I. We All Have to Wait Sometimes.

Waiting, after all, is the price we pay for being limited human beings who do not have the power to make good things happen when we want them to happen. There are a lot of good things that we want to happen right now. We may want them to happen today almost as much as we want life itself. But sometimes there is not a blessed thing we can do to make them happen. We are limited; this is why we have to wait so much. There is something about having to wait that tries our souls.

II. Nobody Likes to Wait.

I've never met a person who likes to wait. Let's say you have made a two o'clock appointment with your dentist and you showed up at quarter to two, but now it's three o'clock and you are still cooling your heels in his waiting room. What kind of person would enjoy that experience?

Waiting is worst of all when you are waiting for the surgeon to come and tell you whether your husband's operation was a success and whether he is going to make it. Or waiting for your own prodigal son to shape up and come to his senses.

When you get right down to it, waiting is just about the most unpleasant thing we ever do. And besides,

III. Waiting Is the Hardest Thing We Ever Do.

Waiting is a thousand times harder than to do something to make happen what we want to happen. And God knows the media does not make it any easier for us to learn to wait. Somebody is always yelling at us to do something and do it right now: call now, act now, buy now, sell now, get those pills right now that will give you instant relief, right now. Sometimes it feels to me that our whole culture is a conspiracy to make it hard for us to wait.

Some time ago, I was a guest at the home of a very powerful man and his very talented wife. Believe me, this man was in charge of a lot of important things and a lot of people. But once I got over being impressed by him, I began to feel a simmering sadness under the smooth surface of that home. Something felt wrong to me. So I said: "You must forgive me if I am being intrusive but I feel a sadness here in your house, a grief maybe. Am I right?" Yes, I was right. And they told me what the trouble was.

They had an eighteen year old daughter who had left home and was wandering around the country and nobody knew where or how she was surviving. No phone calls, no letters. "What in the world can we do?" this powerful man asked me. "It seems to me," I said, "there is nothing you can do except the hardest thing of all, pray and wait. "Ah," said this man who had so much power over so many important people, "Wait, yes, wait. But it is so hard, so hard to do nothing but wait." He's right.

Let me repeat the essence of what I have said about waiting: we all have to wait sometime, we all hate to wait, and waiting is the hardest job of all.

But there are times when we actually prefer to wait. In fact,

IV. Waiting Can Be a Beautiful Experience.

There are some things that we want to wait for. Do you want your little girl to become an instant woman? Aren't you glad that autumn comes in at its leisure--that the leaves do not turn brown and blow off the trees by the first gusty wind of October? Isn't the most fun often in the watching and waiting?

Far as I can tell, God is not in a hurry. Nature is seldom in a hurry. And, most of the time, that is how we like it.

Here is my next thought:

V. People Who Cannot Wait Almost Always Make Things Worse.

People who have never learned to wait are hard to live with. A new boss who struts into a shop and changes everything around as soon as gets there almost always orders things fixed at once that don't need fixing at all.

Fools like Stalin and Mao thought they could create a Utopia at once; by the power of a gun barrel. Foolish rulers rush their people into foolish wars. Foolish parents rush their children into acting like adults before they are ready; foolish children rush into sex before they are ready. It is a law of life: people who cannot wait usually end up hurting other people. People who know how to wait are effective people at getting things done.

And now I want to tell you that there is also an important spiritual thing about waiting.

VI. The Strength to Wait Comes from Faith.

The moment we stop believing, we stop waiting.

I thought about this lately when I was waiting to board a plane at a very small airport in a very small town. Departure time 2 o'clock. I checked in at 1:30. And then I walked over to take a look at the monitor: it said my flight was delayed. Why? Not a clue. How long will we have to wait? Not clue. At 2:30 I checked again: still delayed. Again at 3 and 3:30 and 4--and again at 5 o'clock. Still delayed! So what did I do? I went back to my chair and waited, but what kept me waiting? Why didn't I give up and go back to my hotel? I will tell you the reason I kept waiting was this: I believed that the plane was going to take off sooner or later. If I had not believed it, I would have stopped waiting for it. But I did believe it. So I kept on waiting and my plane did take off.

It is the same way when we wait for God. As long as we have faith that he wants good things for us we will wait for him. Maybe we need faith most of all when we have to wait for God himself.

VII. In Fact, Waiting For God Is The Supreme Test of Faith.

I once counted the times that the Bible tells us to wait for God: 53 times. Over and over again, 53 times, we read words like these: "Wait for the Lord; be of good courage... Wait, I say, on the Lord." (Psalm 27:14). The writers of the Bible knew from experience how long we sometimes have to wait for God. Here is the Psalm writer talking about himself: "I keep waiting for the Lord, my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning."

Sometimes it feels as if God has gone on leave of absence and left no forwarding address. And it takes a leap of faith to keep waiting for him to come back. It's easy to have faith when you just feel God very close to you and when he has just answered your prayer. But it is a struggle when it seems as if God just keeps putting us off.

One thing is sure, we cannot force God to follow our schedule. We cannot force him to wake up when our alarm clock rings. But we can do is make sure we are ready for him when he does come. In fact, keeping ready for God is exactly what faith often comes down to. Faith is like a window that you keep open for the Spirit of God to blow into your life. Or faith is like a cup that you hold out waiting for God to fill. He will come; he will come; just be sure you stay ready for him when he gets there.

There is an old gospel song that speaks to us about waiting for God when our hearts cry out for him to come and help us. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Don't let go. Don't let go. Hold on. Hold on. He's coming back. He's coming back. He's coming back. He will come back to you. He'll come back. Keep on waiting for him and make sure you are ready for him when he comes.

Interview with Lewis Smedes
Interviewed by Floyd Bronw

Floyd Brown: Dr. Smedes, I really enjoyed your message. As I sat there and listened, I thought of all the times that I've had to wait: wait for a whipping when they said, "I'm going to get you when I get home at night," wait for Christmas. But there are also some very serious times in our lives when we have to wait. Tell us a story when you have had to wait most of all.

Lewis Smedes: Look at my hair, Floyd. You'll know I've had a lot of it! But this is a story that is really precious to me. I have three children, adopted. My oldest one is a wonderful, wonderful woman. Now when she was adolescent--15, 16, 17--she was a very unhappy fellow. She had such a terrible time thinking about who she really was, you see, and I wanted so much to be able to wave a wand and make her happy.

I wanted to put a key in her heart and turn it and it didn't happen, and I wondered where God was. You could find me sometimes lying belly down on the floor, imploring God. Later on she told me that she prayed and said, "God didn't do anything." And I thought there is a time when God wasn't paying any attention to my house. Three years!

I was telling this story to a class I was teaching on prayer. A woman in the back seat raised her hand and said, "I want to say something." She said, "I know your daughter. I went all through high school with her. I knew everything that was going on in your house. I knew it all through her eyes, and I'm here to tell you that I became a Christian because of what I saw there."

Brown: Wow!

Smedes: She's a Christian minister today. Now, I'm not telling you that I understand what she saw because still to me it was a most painful time of the absence of God, but God was in it working through something to reach this woman, and I like to think that sometimes when we have to wait for God, he finally comes back. We also discover that he was there all the time, like he was in Jesus on the cross. But it was God when Jesus was on the cross. He was in Jesus reconciling the world.

Brown: A very good story. You know, in your book, How Can It Be All Right..., you have a line that says, "Believing does not come easy."And if I can read just a little bit from the book, "Too many people I care about hurt too much to let believing come easy. People close to me get cancer and die too soon. My prayers do not take away the pain and hold back the tolling of the bells. My friends' marriages turn into battlefields and their children go through a hundred kinds of many hells. God does not have many miracles for my crowd." What do you say to someone listening here who has that same challenge now?

Smedes: I'm an expert in it, but what I've discovered after all these years I've been wrestling and dancing with God for a lot of years and what I've so often discovered, Floyd, is if I just hang on and keep waiting, keep waiting he'll come. He'll come and when he does, you'll know it's he who has come. I know that.

Brown: What's been the reaction so far to your book, How Can It Be All Right When Everything is All Wrong?

Smedes: Well, it's been a kind of miracle book in some ways because so many things happen to people when they read it that I never dreamed of. I had a call one morning--I live in California, remember--from a woman in Pennsylvania on a Monday afternoon. At first I thought she was hysterical. She said, "The first thing I want you to know is that I was born and reared a militant atheist. The second thing I want you to know is that I'm a militant feminist." She said, "I was in Seattle over the weekend speaking to 1,200 women and when I was getting down off the platform, a woman stuck a little book in my hands and I stuffed it in my bag. When I went out on the patio this morning to rest up from the weekend, I put my hand down and pulled up that little book and I opened it and began reading it and I found God! What am I going to tell my father?" This is another wonderful thing she said: she asked God, "Do I have to call you Father?" She said, "I thought I heard him say, 'I don't care what you call me as long as I call you my child.'" Isn't that a great story?

Brown: That's a great story.

Smedes: I tell you, if I had written a thousand books and that was the only reaction I had, that would be worth it.

Brown: Well, you've certainly written a lot of books and you've given a lot of marvelous talks, including today's. We've certainly enjoyed it and we thank you so much for being here.