Photo by Massimo Virgilio on Unsplash

Following on from my previous blog about Drawing on Spiritual Resources, one of the phrases I referred to as not being particularly helpful is ‘waiting for the Lord’.  After all for busy people with the demands and pressures of 21^st century life on them, just sitting and doing nothing, even if they’re doing it prayerfully and expectantly, is not going to go down well.

The day after publishing that blog, quite independently, two people emailed me quoting that expression from Isaiah 40:31 as an encouragement.  So I thought I’d better delve a bit more deeply into its meaning.

But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

It turns out that the Hebrew word qavah can indeed be translated as ‘wait’, often with a sense of hope, eagerness or anticipation, perhaps like a child whose birthday has arrived but who hasn’t been given the presents yet.  It is used several times in the Old Testament in this sense.

But it has another meaning – to bind together, to twist.  The imagery is of making a rope, which by twisting many strands together makes the finished rope stronger than each individual strand would have been by itself.

So these two meanings amplify each other, and active, eager waiting for God also involves us binding ourselves to God.  Reminiscent of the verse in Ecclesiastes “ a cord of three strands is not quickly broken (4:12).  Since this verse is in the context of ‘two are better than one’, it is a small leap of imagination to think of that period of impatient waiting when two lives are being merged into one couple – engagement.

And waiting for the Lord is rather like that.  There is the eager anticipation, whether of healing, or a permit coming through, or support-raising hitting the critical threshold, but while we prayerfully wait and cannot move forward without the Lord acting, we can take the opportunity, like an engaged couple, to intentionally start getting to know each other better.

People preparing for the big day hopefully realise they are planning for a marriage and not just a wedding.  They ask each other searching questions: ‘What do you think about…  how do you do this… which do you prefer…’ with a view to understanding each other better.  They might seek advice and mentoring from more experienced Christians.  They might do a marriage preparation course to help them prepare.  And they do things together so they can find out who likes what, and whether it’s an activity they could share.

So a period of enforced waiting isn’t necessarily a time of inactivity.  We can be actively drawing closer to God and twisting our life together with God’s.  Then we will renew our strength.  Or will we?

The Hebrew word chalaph which is translated as ‘renew’ in this context means to gain something different, in the same sense that Joseph changed his clothes when he came out of the prison (Genesis 41:14, also chalaph in Hebrew).  He didn’t just wash his prison uniform.  He put on clothing fit to meet Pharaoh in.  It must have been given to him, as an imprisoned slave is unlikely to have owned glad rags.

Likewise this new strength that we get isn’t ours, it’s God’s and it comes as a result of us intentionally interweaving the strands of our life with God’s life so that God’s strength flows through us.  Or, as God explained to Paul why he was waiting for his healing, “My power is perfected in your weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).