Moving at the Speed of God

He’s going.

She texted just those two words. I didn’t need more.

I knew.

Those two words ushered me into a most mysterious place, holy, where one could almost feel the outer edge of the wind that must have roared through a hospital room 500 miles away when the curtain between heaven and earth tore open just briefly.

In the 15-odd minutes that passed between that message and the next, the one that said he’d gone home, I hung suspended in time, between the mighty roar and the holy hush. Without further thought, I prayed.

When the edge of eternity sits so close as to feel the breeze, what else would we do?

I don’t remember what words poured. But I know I insisted on immediate intervention.

I asked God to move, swiftly.

For legs to stand, arms to hold, hearts to . . . something.

It was all about sustaining. Or something like that.

But I do remember I expected results.

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Isn’t this how we pray? For results?

Isn’t this how He told us to pray? Expectantly? Confidently? Persistently? Effectively?

To pray expecting results is to pray as Jesus prayed.

And I love results.

I prize productivity and efficiency and measurable results. Give me that which I can reduce to spreadsheet data and we’ve had ourselves a very good day.

Even so, without diminishing the infinite worth of a God Who answers prayer — a God Who delivers results – I’m coming to concede that prayer is so multi-dimensional that to limit it to the tangible reality of answers leaves me with just a few crusts in my fist when I could have a whole loaf, warm and steaming from the oven, with butter dripping down the sides.

We do pray for results, yes. But more, we pray for the sake of relationship.

And so, Matt Woodley reminds me this week, my tendency to drill down a prayer life into measurable results separates me from the foundational necessity of waiting on God. His chapter on Prayer as a Long, Slow Journey eases me, slowly, into remembering why long ago I forbade myself from keeping a log of prayer requests and answers.

Not that these remembrances aren’t good for most people. Recalling God’s faithfulness is essential in our worship and it builds our faith in His care and provision. For me, though, such journals are a punch card, and unanswered requests a nagging indictment of the ineffectiveness of my own prayer. I’m prone to look at such lists and, weary of questioning my own capacity to move God, point fingers at Him for His failure to deliver the expected results.

We develop the wrong assumption about prayer: we think that prayer is primarily about getting things from God — right now! — rather than primarily about being with God. We assume prayer implies that God must change our circumstances right now, when prayer really implies that God needs to change us. We neglect the truth that prayer ushers us into God-time, a broad and spacious land where things move slowly but perfectly. In particular, waiting-on-the-Lord prayer changes the rhythm in our souls; it adjusts us to God’s timetable, not the other way around. As a result, as we pray, as we spend time in God’s presence, we start moving at the speed of God.  . . . Prayer bends our souls to the speed of God’s loving purposes for us, for our loved ones and for the whole earth. (Matt Woodley, The Folly of Prayer: Practicing the Presence and Absence of God, p.99, emphasis added)

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Moving at the speed of God.

Can I tell you how I like the sound of that? I do. Because it sounds much like the speed of light. And since God created light, and speed, well then, the speed of God must exceed the speed of light by, well, light years.

Right?

Blast. Wrong again.

The speed of God’s loving purposes. That’s really not break-neck, is it?

I remember the speed at which God worked His loving purposes in the lives of the children of Israel. Those loving purposes moved in 40-year increments as He delivered them up from Egypt.

I remember the speed at which God worked His loving purposes through the life of Joseph. Those loving purposes made stop-offs in slavery, in prison, and in long journeys by foot back and forth between the palace and his father’s home.

I remember the speed at which God worked His loving purposes through One sent to defeat death and hell. Even then, those loving purposes meant waiting through generations of an ancestral line until His birth, and then waiting for Him to grow into a man, and then, to die, to rise again, and then to leave, not yet taking us along.

And then I look at me. Is it any wonder that God-time doesn’t run on the same kind of clock I use to measure time?

I won’t pretend otherwise. I find waiting-on-the-Lord time to be infuriating. It topples the finely tuned control I maintain of my life. I find it exasperating when mountains do not move on command. And sometimes I feel just like that woman badgering the judge at all hours until she finally saw some action.

And yet. And yet.

And yet, when I quiet down to where I can hear His clock ticking, and sense that the rhythm is wholly different than mine, I remember what’s really going on. And if I let Him unwind my clock and “bend my soul” to His time, I find those hours and days and weeks and months to be sweet. No pressure for results, just growing into the patience that Woodley describes as the “soil of true prayer.”

James reminds us: See how the farmer waits.

And I think, perhaps, there is even a good yield to be had in the waiting.

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Photo: Driving by Peter Suneson via Stock.xchng