I have found that much of life—if not most of life—is about waiting.  I was sending someone an overnight package the other day and as I stood at the counter handing it to the clerk, he asked me: “Do you need us to get a signature from the recipient?”  I didn’t have a clue and the package was urgent, so I didn’t want to get it wrong.  I sent a quick text to the person I was sending it to, hoping for an immediate reply, as the clerk looked from me to the line growing behind me.  I stared at my phone hoping that I would hear back right away before the clerk ran me off… waiting… waiting… the text came. Got my answer…whew!  Such a small thing, but those seconds felt like forever.

Whether it’s waiting in traffic, waiting on the next job assignment to come through, waiting for the day of that scary doctor’s appointment, waiting for healing from a lost relationship, waiting to find a spouse, to walk down the aisle, or to have children…we all find ourselves in places of waiting.

Back in early July, I prayed a prayer that went something like this: “God, I praise you that you have not “left me out” from experiencing this blessing.” I was thanking God that we were expecting our first child.  I had waited so long to get married and to have children; I couldn’t believe it was really real.  It was a sincere prayer, one of true thankfulness, but, as I stepped back to listen to what I was actually saying, I stopped in my tracks and questioned what my words implied. Do I believe that God is going to leave me out from experiencing the blessings my heart longs for just because I’m not experiencing them now?  It made me do some real soul searching!  In that prayer, what I was really saying was that if I didn’t get to experience certain things or  “blessings” in life, my life would feel empty and unsatisfied.  That made me ask some more questions: “Was my faith really in the unchanging, loving character of God or in what I wanted to get out of life?  Do I believe that the God of the universe, my all loving, all knowing provider, would just leave me out in the cold and withhold precious blessings?”

I was single for a long time, not knowing if God had marriage and family in mind for me. I saw every last one of my close college friends married and having children years before Stanton, my future husband, and I even met.  I did wonder in the deep recesses of my heart if I would be left out from something I so desired and I saw many other people enjoying.  So, I waited, I prayed. I cried out to God, pleading with him to answer.

At the root of it, the questions that were just below the surface were:  If my heart is longing for all these blessings from your hand, God, and they are not realized now nor ever, does that mean I can’t live a blessed life?  What is the blessed life, anyway?  What if God’s idea of the blessed life is very different than my idea of a blessed life?   The truth is, even if I doubt at times, I do believe God is good, loving, and His character unchanging. What if allowing me to wait or even to feel “left out” is part of God’s way of “letting me in” to His throne room to draw near to him and find truer, deeper satisfaction than I ever would have known otherwise?

I’d like to look at a few snapshots of people in the Bible who were called to wait on God and might have felt “left out.”  Then take a brief look at what the truly blessed life is by looking at Jesus’ teaching on it in Matthew 5.

You know our good friends Abraham and Sarah from Genesis. They could not conceive a child even into their old age.  They had given up on it. The desire in Sarah’s heart wasn’t even alive anymore because she knew her body wasn’t capable in her old age.  There’s an incredible piece of music by Estonian composer Arvo Part that illustrates in sound color the bleak agony Sarah endured as she approached 90 years old without having a child.  It depicts a heart suppressing desire with stark harmonies and intermittent knocking.  Was God withholding that blessing so she and Abraham would suffer, be miserable, and writhe in their longing?   In Genesis 17:1, listen to what God’s heart beats for and Abraham’s reaction: “When Abram was ninety years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God almighty, walk before me and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly… Then Abram fell on his face…. And God said to him “no longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations…kings shall come from you.”  “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah, and I will bless her and I will give you a son by her.”  If we step back and look at God’s larger story, Abraham and Sarah could not see what God was doing on their behalf until he revealed it to them after many long years.  We do find that God was drawing them closer to Him to receive the fullness of His blessing and work a miracle through them to bless all the nations.

Then there was Moses. He spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness waiting to enter the Promised Land. Watching. Waiting. Laboring for and leading the people. God showed His glory and holiness to Moses.  God made Moses into who He wanted him to be, using Moses’ sin to lead him back to God, shape him and make him holy.  Then at the end of Moses’ life he was brought to the edge of the mountain in De. 34 to finally see across to the Promised Land. As he took it all in, he took his last breath.  God allowed Joshua to see it to fulfillment and lead the people into the land.

What about Hannah? In 1 Samuel 1 we learn that she longed for a son and endured great contempt from others for not having one.  She prayed so hard and long and loud, crying out to God for a son, that the temple priest, Eli, thought she was drunk.  God heard her prayers and answered in His time.  Hannah finally had a child. God allowed her longing and waiting to refine her heart so much so that she was willing to give her child entirely back to God to serve Him in the temple. She received the blessing not as one she would take and use for her own good, but for the Lord’s purposes.  God raised up a mighty prophet from her womb, the prophet Samuel.  As she gave Samuel up to the Lord and out of her own care, she said: “My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in the LORD…There is none holy like the LORD; there is none besides you; there is no rock like our God.”

Then – there is Mary.  She must have thought she was left out of the beauty and simplicity of the whole marriage process.  I wonder if she had waited and longed for a peaceful engagement and smooth transition into marriage?  Her move from singleness to marriage was anything but culturally smooth. Having to endure thoughts of a pending, premature divorce and being shunned by her community for assumed impropriety.   Finally being wed, then having to immediately make a journey of nearly 100 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem on a donkey while labor was imminent.  I looked up the distance on Google maps, and even now in 2011 for walking directions from Nazareth to Bethlehem it says:  “Use caution – this route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”  Did God allow her to go through these circumstances to leave her out in the cold… to deny her the blessings her heart may have desired?  I believe the answer is no.  In the call to endure—to trust, to live by faith, to seek the reality of God’s presence when the world had pushed her away, the greater blessing was in the suffering that allowed her to draw near to her God and be made more like Him as the bearer of God’s son.

Yes, God is concerned with the longings of our hearts:  Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor.  No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.”

He uses the desires of our hearts not to make us feel “left out” but to pull us toward Him, to let us IN and show us what the blessed life really is.  Jesus laid it out in the beatitudes in Matthew 5.  He shows us the keys to the blessed life that we see in the lives of Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Hannah, and Mary.

“Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.  And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied… “

Jesus tells us the first posture of the blessed life is poverty of spirit.  Everything else flows from that place.  My husband and I have been studying D. Martin Lloyd Jones “Studies on the Sermon on the Mount” and loving it, learning so much!  Lloyd Jones points out that poverty of spirit “is the fundamental characteristic of the Christian and of the citizen of the Kingdom of heaven.”  What is poverty of Spirit?  What is it that we are to be empty of?  Self-reliance.

Jesus starts this sermon on a mountain with his newly called disciples with this teaching:  “There is a mountain you have to scale, there are heights you have to climb; and the first thing you must realize as you look at that mountain which you are told you must ascend, is that you cannot do it, that you are utterly incapable in and of yourself and that any attempt to do it in your own strength is proof positive that you have not understood it.”

Jesus shows here what he is concerned most about: “ultimately a man’s attitude towards Himself.”

He then moves on to mourning to show our absolute need of Him:  Blessed are those who mourn.  “To ‘mourn’ is something that follows from being poor in spirit…”  The world is meant for shalom – But our sin violates the way things are supposed to be.  So, we mourn our sin and our separation from God.

And because of this, Jesus next incites us to meekness.  To live the Blessed life is to learn to be meek.

Meekness comes from knowledge of our sinfulness.  The more we know of the depth, intransigence, persistence and power of our sin, the more we see ourselves for who we really are. Meekness is a true view of me that works its way into my attitude toward myself and fuels the way I interact with others.

These beatitudes are the mind of Christ and lead us to the truly blessed life– Phil 2 says: “Have this mind among you which was also in Christ Jesus…”

And one more ties it all together: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  They will be satisfied.”

We find here that happiness or “Blessedness” does not come from the pursuit of happiness or the fulfillment of our longings for earthly blessings.  It comes from the pursuit of righteousness, which sometimes makes us unhappy, but which, when walked by faith, surely makes us stronger, less anxious, more effective, and therefore living more as God intended, content and more deeply grateful for all He has given us in this life…. because our life is found in Christ…His righteousness transferred to us.

As we look at the lives of Mary, Hannah, Moses, Abraham & Sarah, we see a common theme of bowing down before God, crying out to him, pursuing Him while waiting in faith, trusting their very lives to the God of their salvation.  This is the pursuit of righteousness.  Whether they received what their hearts desired or not, any sense of being “left out” was turned into the doorway to being “let in” to the most blessed life they could have ever had.

The blessed life is the life that is lived before the face of God in poverty of spirit, mourning my sin, meekness, and hungering after His righteousness—because in that place, walking with us through the ache, the longing, the waiting, Christ will satisfy!

It’s true that God uses what He gives and takes away to make me into who He wants me to become, and while He’s at it, His heart beats to be close to mine.  Even though I can’t see His larger story most of the time, I see that the times I feel most “left out” are the times God ushers me into His presence to assure me that He is there and has not left me to fend for myself.

Wherever you are, I want to encourage you to cling to God through His word.  Study the blessed life from God’s vantage point.  It’s hard work, but that’s what discipleship is.  We’re all in it together working out our faith.  Remember His promises that fill us up:

(Psalm 138:8) “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me. Your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever.”
Picture God who is YOUR father, saying “I know the plans I have for you…plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11)
“He is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” (2 Corinthians 9:8)
(Titus 2:11) For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions…and we are waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.
(Psalm 27:14)  “I believe that I will look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”
(Micah 7:7) But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.

Kathryn Brunner is the director of worship and creative arts for a church in the Washington Metropolitan area. She holds an M.A. in Biblical Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. Kathryn is also a songwriter and recording artist. You can hear her music on iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/made-for-me/id445096117) or on her website (www.kathrynbrunnermusic.com).