Do you ever feel like God isn’t there? There are a few things in my private little world that I struggle with constantly, pray for help with constantly, and constantly never seem to receive God’s help. One of these things is patience. I had none. In fact, it’s not a lack of patience more so than an insurgence of impatience that seemed to be my problem. Impatience had taken on a life of its own. It was almost like a mean little person who lived here in our house with me and my family, riding piggy-back with me from conversation to conversation. I wanted to rip the remote from my husband if he didn’t fast-forward through commercials fast enough. I would take over whatever my kids were doing if they weren’t doing it fast enough, or soon enough…a few weeks ago, my 6 year old boy was trying to string little beads, and I thought I was absolutely going to lose it.
I’m a person who talks to God all day long, but I have a more formal prayer time in the mornings and evenings. In the mornings, I like to go out in the back yard and look at the beauty of the pond, the water fowl just starting their day, and I take in the silence of it saying a brief prayer. My prayer always includes asking for patience for the day. At night, I climb in bed, grab my Bible, and ready myself to read a chapter before drifting off. Before I open the Book, I pray about the day: my thanks and my petitions (the things I want). I find myself saying something like, “I am so sorry for the impatient way I acted with (so-and-so) when they did (this-and-that).” Then I ask God, “Hey, where were you in all of that? Why did you let that happen?”, or, “When exactly will you be stepping in to help me with my impatience?” I pray about it all the time and nothing seems to change. Does that ever happen to you?
Meantime, I am dragging my feet through Joshua and Judges, because, as you know, the OT is like cod-liver oil: in my head I know it’s good for me and I will appreciate it when I am older; but in my heart I feel like – Ugh! It’s so hard to swallow. I don’t yet appreciate it…but I know I should. So I get to the end of Joshua where he is giving his farewell speech after having brought Israel over the Jordan, into the promised land, and conquered all the big cities so that Israel can now split up the land between the tribes and take up residence. Then he passes along a really interesting message from God to the people of Israel that straightened my back a bit in relation to my prayer about impatience.
God says, “If you turn away (from me) and ally yourself with the survivors of these nations (survivors of the conquered cities) that remain among you, and if you intermarry with them and associate with them, then you may be sure that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you. Instead, they will become snares and traps for you, whips on your backs and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land, which the Lord your God has given you.” (Joshua 23:12 & 13)
Personally speaking, God has brought me out of many Egypts in my life. He brought me out of my childhood and made my adult life a promised land that I never imagined. He saved my family from a painful dynamic and delivered us into loving relationships. Different careers, motherhood, you name it: it varies in size and scale but God has fought many battles with me, and He has paved many roads for me. And this passage says, “hey, you are going to have some internal habits and bad baggage remaining from the battles we have won together, and you need to NOT cling to them. On your own strength, you need to avoid them. Else, you become a slave to them…right back where you started. And not only that, but, your life will become a dead-end, because I won’t pave any more roads for you.”
Finally, I saw my impatience as a survivor of some previous battle. I finally realized that every ounce of energy I was giving to impatience was a measure of denying God. He has done a lot of fighting for me, and I will not let impatience cause us (me and God) to lose ground. It’s up to me to kick off the piggy-back rider, and not associate with it. Instead of praying for God to take it from me, I now pray that God show me resources available to tap into my own strength and use it to not associate myself with impatience anymore. …to ’strengthen my back’, rather than ‘lighten the load’.
Notice that I said I need the strength to, “not associate with it”, rather than “get rid of it”. I think impatience will always have residence in my world – just like the survivors of the conquered cities in the promised land – but the strength comes in the restraint of engaging with something. The goal is not to get rid of it, but to ignore it. This shift in focus allowed me to accept help from other people and books who, all of the sudden, came into my life right after I prayed for finding resources to tap into my strength. God was listening. This was just a little battle for me to fight…not Him.
This is what God taught me about myself through Joshua. I think it’s amazing, don’t you?
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