Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.

• Romans 8:19

“Human beings are the losers; God is the winner. God lets human beings start; he lets them make progress, have success, and seems himself to be totally passive. His countermoves seem rather insignificant, and we seldom notice them at all. So we march forward, proud and self-confident and certain of our success and ultimate victory. But God can wait; sometimes he waits year after year…. God waits in the hope that people will finally understand his moves and want to turn their life over to him. But once in every life – perhaps it will not be until the hour of death- God crosses our way, so that we can no longer take a step. We must stop and in fear and trembling recognize God’s power and our own weakness and wretchedness. … Only in these great moments in our life do we understand the meaning of God’s guidance in our life; only then do we understand God’s patience and God’s wrath. And only now do we recognize that these hours in which God crossed our way are the only hours of real importance in our life. They alone make our life worth living.”

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I Want to Live These Days with You (devotion for December 28, devotions compiled from his writings)

God has patience.  He has not just read the Bible from cover to cover; He inspired the writing of it.  He knows how all this turns out.

And God is in control.

We can see the wars and rumors of wars, and we can get upset and pray for God to deliver us.  But who are we?  If we had more patience… If we had more faith that God is in control… If we trusted God when He says that all things work for the good …

Did I dig the hole deep enough?

God can wait.  He knows what happens next.  But I have to remember that day that is now almost sixty years ago.  I have to remember when I was at my wits end, when God crossed my path as Bonhoeffer says here and I could no longer move until I surrendered.

My wife talked about my monumental failure at being patient.  She had a one-year-old in her arms and I should wait in line at the phone company office at the Post Exchange for hours.  She had a baby to take care of, but I would have to take a day of leave to do that.  The line wrapped around the building at lunch time, and the office was closed by the time I went home in the evening.

I knew what my wife would do.  She would have another mother take care of our son, one who owed her a favor when the other mother needed a favor.  And my wife’s only problem then would be that she would miss an episode of General Hospital.  It was odd that she never liked soap operas, but when there was only one channel to watch on our American TV in Germany, she got addicted to the only soap opera that they televised, and it was about 2 months behind the shows in the USA.  When she got home, she was lost with that two-month gap in all the storylines, and she never watched another soap opera again.

But my wife offered her story in a different light when anyone said anything about people being patient or having a lack of patience.  Her story was that she had a one-year-old crawling all over her while she waited six hours in knee deep snow…  Reality check.  The neighbor took care of the toddler.  The wait was about two hours.  And the line wrapped around the upstairs hallway, past the barber shop and the bank, and never outside the building.  And when this occurred, there was no snow on the ground.

But I would endure the “Tsk! Tsk!” from all who heard my wife’s tale of woe.  She told it so convincingly, and if the truth were known, I hated to wait in lines.

Actually, we had to make several trips to the phone company office.  We had a one-year-old who used the telephone cord to pull himself up, and German-made phones at the time tended to shatter when they hit the hardwood floor.  I waited in line one of those times, and the phone company office staff gave me grief about where was my wife?

While I waited in line that time, a private asked me who was in charge of this outfit.  I remembered what Gen. Omar Bradley said in the movie Patton when a similar soldier asked him that question.  Of course, Gen. Bradley was in charge of the operation, but his response to the soldier was, “I don’t know, but they oughta hang him.”  I guess the private accepted my response since I was waiting just as long as he did.

No, many people who call themselves Christians never have that moment where God crosses their path.  They think that God is there to serve them.  They do not have that reference point when they realized how puny they really are.

But that same God who knows everything knows the human condition also.  And although He sees the light at the end of the tunnel, He knows that we do not see that light, or hardly ever…

And when we fuss complain and ask, “Why me, Lord!”, God is patient.  God can wait.  He did not read the last page.  He wrote it.

And while God is patient because what He has in mind to be that final trigger has not happened yet, God is patient with our impatience.

Why?

He loves us that much.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.