The Worry of Waiting

Recently Patty and I have been watching JAG. You remember the mid 90’s series about the Navy’s Judge Advocate General corp. (Lawyers.) The show is great and is almost exclusively about the Navy and Marine Corp. We have also been waiting for God’s move. The church in SC has rescheduled a date for us to preach in view of a call. A church in Roswell has made contact. A local church, what a novel concept. Except that they are looking for bi-vocational. So we continue to wait.

These two merged together this afternoon. My family is a Navy family. Three of my uncles served in WWII, my great grandfather was Navy, and my dad and another uncle were in the Navy in peacetime. I was in the Navy. We are a Navy family. Watching JAG reminded me of something my dad told me about that happened to him. (Actually, I think I remembered it because Mark Richt, the UGA head coach, jumped from a 30’ platform backward to prove a point to the team.)

Anyway, when dad was in training—he was an Aviation Ordinanceman— he had to go through flight survival school. Flight survival school in the Navy means water landings. Unless you are in a plane designed to land in the water, a water landing is a crash landing with the possibility of drowning and sharks. They strap you into a cockpit seat on a track, slam it into a pool, where it, by design, flips upside down and sinks. You have a set time to unstrap, open the hatch, and swim to the surface. Between the adrenaline, the disorientation, and the impact from hitting the water, over half of the first timers swim toward the bottom of the pool!

The trick is to wait. After unstrapping and unlocking…wait. If you wait, two things happen. One, the flight jacket will begin to pull you toward the surface. Second, by gaining your orientation, you will notice that the bubbles from the wreckage are floating toward the surface. Follow the bubbles upward.

When the forces of this world slam us, when our life crash lands, and that crash is not even the worst part, when we start to drown, when we become disoriented, and when the sharks are lurking, we panic. We get impatient. We accuse God. We kick and we flail.

But David says that the trick is to wait. In Psalm 27 David says, “Wait on the LORD, be of good courage and He shall strengthen your heart; Wait, I say, on the LORD.” (Psalm 27:11;14) When we wait on the Lord, we regain our buoyancy. We get our sea legs back. Then, like the flight jacket, the tug of God will begin to lift our beleaguered souls back to the surface, toward His love. When we wait, we can observe the bubbles of the Holy Spirit’s presence, and follow His lead back to safety. When we wait.

Blessings,

Steve