Bread – Patient

Psalm 40

“I waited patiently for the Lord;…He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog,…”  Ps. 40:1-2

I love words that sound like they mean.  Somehow the phrase “miry bog” conveys just the sense of being stuck in a lonely place.  More than stuck, however, it conveys being mired down in thick, gooey, mud.  The kind of thick gooey mud that you sink a foot into and then, when you try to lift your leg up, it sucks off your shoe.  My idea of bog is a mist-covered barren place, with a few sticks which try to simulate bushes sticking out of the ground, and bigger sticks barely observable in the gloom, which might be trees.

In other words, stuck knee deep in a place which will not let you go, which wears you out totally as you try to make progress, all surrounded by … nothing.

This is a dreadful place and a place where many of us find ourselves on a regular basis.  Perhaps out miry bog is our work, perhaps it is our relationships, perhaps our family, perhaps just even ourselves.

Now, here we are, no rescue in sight … will we be patient and wait?  No.  Instead, we will look around for ways we can help ourselves out of the bog and get on solid ground.  We may seek the assistance of a bushy stick and we likely will yell for help, thinking that help even from a denizen of the deep is better than no help at all.

How much worse than to have that miry bog at the bottom of a deep well.  Even if you could unstick yourself, you still have to climb out!

What did David do while he was in the miry bog, in the pit of destruction?  He waited patiently.

When we are surrounded, when we are dug in deep, when we are in the pit, when we are stuck in the mud … what is our action as a person?  It is to do, impatiently.  What is our action as a Christian?  It is to wait patiently, to be patient.

This week, as we are beset with many problems, not the least of which is the election of a new President of the United States, we know we are mired in mud in a boggy place, deep in the pit.

David and the Lord counsel patience, waiting upon Him to act on our behalf.  Not very easy and, to western eyes, often not very fruitful.  And yet that is what we do when we trust Him, and not ourselves.

God, give me patience, please!  And, Holy Spirit, why don’t you hurry up and come so that I can have patience.  Oh, wait a minute, I guess I need to have patience for that as well.

Come, God, pull me out of my pit, out of my miry bog!  I know He will; I just don’t know when.  And that is why I am impatient – I want out now.  But I am not God – He is.  And that is why I need to patient, because my true help comes from the Lord.

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© 2016 GBF   All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (2001), unless otherwise indicated.