The Quiet Lessons We All Learn in Our Waiting Rooms: Faith Reflections from a Cancer Oven (#14)
[A note from our Managing Editor: Tim Shorey, pastor and author, is one of our Gospel-Centered Discipleship staff writers. Tim is also currently battling stage 4 prostate cancer. On Facebook and CaringBridge, he’s writing about his journey. We’re including some of his posts in a series on our website called “The Potter’s Clay: Faith Reflections from a Cancer Oven.” To preserve the feel of a daily journal rather than a published work, we have chosen not to submit these reflections to a rigorous editing process.]
* * *
The Quiet Lessons We All Learn in Our Waiting Rooms
August 5, 2023
Dear Journal,
I’ve mentioned before that life is a waiting room. I’ve lost count how many big needs my wife Gayline and I have been praying for—and waiting for—for years! A headache healing. Cancer healing. Children that need the Lord. Unconverted family and friends that still don’t believe. Racial healing in our church local and the Church. Fruitfulness in certain gospel endeavors. Spiritual revival in the Church. We’re still sitting in the waiting room for these and so many others.
And I’m sure we’re not alone. All God’s children have needs and grieve losses. We all believe. We all pray. We all weep. We all wait.
If I had one more sermon to preach, it’d be on this text: “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for 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” (Isa. 40:30–31).
I’ve preached the whole chapter of Isaiah 40 many times, and my most frequent sermon summary of it is this: “God over all, because of Christ, gives strength to the trusting weary, in his time, according to their need, to do the remarkable for his glory.” That’s all in the Isaiah 40 text. And as I say—for a lot of reasons—if God ever gives me strength to preach one more time, that would be the text and summary that I herald.
One point in Isaiah 40 that I notice this morning is the word “wait.” It implies a period of delay in the meeting of our needs or wants, which is why I say: “God gives strength . . . in his time.” There is almost always a time-gap between when we become aware of a need and when God meets it. We have to wait because his clock moves slower than ours, and he’s never in our kind of hurry. So we sit in the waiting room of life.
And I’ve learned that one part of true faith-filled “waiting” is quietness. “In quietness and trust shall be your strength” (Isa. 30:15). Quietness is the opposite of striving and panic. It speaks of peaceful rest, a calm while at the storm’s center. As the psalmist put it, when mountains tremble, waters roar, nations rage and kingdoms totter, the trusting weary remain “still,” knowing that God is God (Ps. 46:1–11).
I need this kind of quiet and peaceful waiting now. I need to resist the anxious, fearful urge to manipulate and orchestrate—to make things happen now, to fix things now, to seize control now, to strive for resolution now, to squeeze people and problems and cancer into my control-driven agenda now.
It brings to mind the Six-P Mode that I wrote of long before my cancer. When we have to wait—for whatever it is that we think we need right now—it is easy to panic, press, push, punish, pout, and plunge. I’m tempted toward each of them as my various trials linger on.
I am tempted to panic—for after all, doesn’t my cancer or unbelieving child or broken relationship or joblessness or loneliness or bereavement or pain or house fire or mad, mad, mad, mad world mean that everything is careening wildly out of control and about to come crashing down?
I’m inclined to push—to demand that whoever or whatever it is that’s causing my distress or making me wait, get with the (my) program.
I’m inclined to press—to double down in my attempts to reason with, persuade, coerce, badger, and manipulate others—including God—to get them to see it my way and realize that I obviously know better than they.
I’m tempted to punish—for as I see it, there is something the matter with people (and/or God) for putting me through this or making me wait so long—and somebody should pay.
I’m tempted to pout—for life is so painfully and pitifully hard, and absolutely nobody at all knows the trouble I’ve seen, and everyone should be able to see that God is picking on me. Everybody has failed me. Woe is me.
Then finally, I can plunge—plunge into despair, giving up on it all, for what’s the use of waiting anymore? There is no hope.
When my heart moves in any of these directions, I need to call it back to quietness. I need to remember that my God will keep me in perfect peace when my mind is stayed on him (Isa. 26:3).
And I need to remember to wait confidently for him to act in his time, for my good, and for his glory, fully convinced that what he has promised, he is able—and committed—to do (Rom. 4:20; 1 Thess. 5:24). He will not fail, for he absolutely cannot.
* You can read all the posts in this series here.
Tim Shorey is married to Gayline, his wife of 45 years, and has six grown children and 14 grandchildren. After over forty years of pastoral ministry, he recently retired from Risen Hope Church, in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Among his books are Respect the Image: Reflecting Human Worth in How We Listen and Talk; The Communion Truce: How Holy Communion Addresses Our Unholy Conflicts; 30/30 Hindsight: 30 Reflections on a 30-Year Headache; his award-winning An ABC Prayer to Jesus: Praise for Hearts Both Young and Old. To find out more, visit timothyshorey.com.