The One About Delays, “Do Not Knows,” and Our Ongoing Need To Deify Things
Dear West Family
What a week. I do hope and pray that you are safe and warm. If you have any needs that we could meet as a community, then please don’t hesitate to respond to this mail. We would love to be able to mobilize the body to attend to anyone in need!
Like you, I have spent a lot of my week looking at the hourly weather forecast on my phone and then looking out my window for confirmation of its accuracy. The week has been terribly unproductive, and our neighborhood - and the majority of its residents - looks almost post apocalyptic in its bleak devastation. There is so much to do to clean up for all of us. Praise God for the common graces of shelter, water, and occasional electricity.
Weeks like this introduce real frustrations and difficulties which can be at play in our walk of faith. I am painfully aware of how upper class and privileged it sounds to reduce something so life-threatening to mere frustrations and difficulties, but bear with me. Many things get rightly canceled or delayed which frustrates us in waiting. I know of someone who has had very important medical testing delayed twice this week, which is a little more significant than a minor scheduling inconvenience. It is a painful delay. In addition, many things are (again rightly) out of our control, and our over-inflated sense of how much we control in our lives has to come up against the reality that there are forces just so much bigger than us in the world, and while we do our best to control what we can, we actually control very little of it.
Both of these sources of frustration - delays and “do not controls” - could and should be sources of humility that drive us to greater dependence on and intimacy with God. However, they more often than not turn into opportunities for idolatry where we turn to lesser things to comfort us and return our sense of control and safety. This has been evidenced in me this week as I noticed myself returning to old patterns of anger and aggression while waiting four hours on an airlines customer service line to reschedule a canceled flight for my mother-in-law. It has been evidenced in increased anxiety and its associated ills in my life of moodiness and carbohydrate consumption.
It reminded me of the people of Israel in Exodus 32.
When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” - Ex 32:1 (ESV)
The people come up against two very human things.
A DELAY. And a “DO NOT KNOW.”
Both delays and “do not knows” expose our weakness and vulnerability and instead of turning to the one true God we are tempted to make deities out of other things, things that don’t make us wait, and things that don’t make us feel like we don’t run the universe, or even know how it works.
Friends, as you encounter your own delays, and as you encounter your own “do not knows,” let us not be like the people of Israel who turned to the short term comfort of self-made gods. Embrace delay as an opportunity to wait on and to wait for the LORD. He always seems late, but He is always on time. Embrace limitation of knowledge as an opportunity to lean in to the wisdom of God and to trust Him that He knows what is best for you even when you can’t see it.
Stay warm and safe friends.
The music this week is from left field. It is a cover of a Soundgarden song played by the one and only Norah Jones. She played this a week after Chris Cornell died on the same stage where he played his final show. It is tragic and haunting and beautiful, and matches my winter mood.
Norah Jones – Black Hole Sun (Detroit Fox Theatre 5.23.17)
See you Sunday,
Ross
