They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)
This word of the prophet Isaiah has been memorized and is the favorite verse of many. But how seriously do they, or any of us, take such a word?
I don’t know anyone who is happy waiting.
When a busy person chided William Wordsworth sitting all day on a stone “doing nothing,” he made this reply:
“Think you ‘mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?
Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
And we can feed this mind of ours, “
In a wise passiveness.
There is a “wise passiveness” to which we can give ourselves and there are times when we ought to sit and “do nothing.”
We prize the virtue of patience, but we seldom practice it. We get “on edge” every time our busy schedules are interrupted. We divide our days into minutes, and we think all is wrong if we are not engaged every
minute. An endless round of activities demand all our energy, and our waking hours are spent moving at a feverish pace.
Eventually we pay for this in one way or another. We pay in physical discomfort and emotional unbalance. Above all, we pay in spiritual in-
security and agitation. Though one of the most difficult lessons in life we must learn: There are times when we simply must wait awhile.
We must wait in order to preserve and discipline our physical energies. Much of life is wasted on the ‘insignificant. It matters that the wheels of life are turning; it matters more that they are turning in the right direction.
We must wait in order to discover truth and direct our lives in the proper channels. The great revelations of life never come to the hurried passersby. They come to those who, like Moses in the long ago, say, “I will turn aside and see.” Our vision is enlarged and our insight is expanded when we stand aside from the tasks in which we are engaged and contemplate the significance or insignificance of all that we are doing. Though at any stage of life there may be only a glimmer of truth, the person who can purposefully wait is assured that more illumination will come.
When da Vinci was painting The Last Supper, the monks who lived where he worked became resentful because of his long period of apparent inactivity. The artist would stand for hours without touching his brush to the canvas before him. Some of the monks even thought he was taking advantage of the contract to do this work. When this was discussed with da Vinci, he answered, “When I pause the longest, I make my most telling strokes with my brush.”
Amid the noise and the hum of the rushing of the day, even in the immediacy of present tasks, we ought to wait awhile. In such creative stillness the ceaseless clamor that drains us of all our energies and that strains our lives to the breaking point can be put aside and we can be restored to face whatever we need to face. Life will take on a new meaning. The job will take on a fresh significance. In quietness and
confidence our work will be done.