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Patience, grasshopper.

I am not a patient person.
I’m a huge fan of immediate gratification and when I go to do a task, I want to get it done and get it done quickly.
This rather charming quality of mine leads to a lot of frustrations for me, and has really come into play when plans change.
We arrived in Phuket on Saturday morning after a 12 hour bus ride through the night. We settled into our home for the next seven weeks and began our briefing and orientation on the culture and the ministry we’ll be doing here. We were told we’d begin going out to the bars on Monday night, and I was restless and ready to go. This is what I’d signed up to do, and I was anxious to begin.
Monday morning rolled around, and we met with our contact to go over the finer details of our ministry. By the end of the meeting, I was feeling pretty confident and ready to go out.
Then our leaders informed us that we weren’t going out that night. . . or the night after. . . or the rest of the week for that matter.  We needed more time to prepare spiritually, so we were told to spend the week really diving into our Bibles and staying in at night to help pray and intercede for the teams going out.
Sometimes I have the audacity to believe that my plan is the best way, or that what I expected to be doing should be what we are doing.
I sat down this afternoon to spend some time praying and reading my Bible, knowing my attitude needed a major adjustment that only Jesus could bring. I sat down on the balcony outside our room looking out over the neighborhood behind us, and prayed that God would just give me patience and send our team a spirit of readiness so we could start going out and doing the ministry we had all signed up for (which is a very contradictory route of prayer, let me tell you). Sitting in frustration and a pool of my own sweat, I opened my Bible and started reading in Acts. Immediately, a verse in bold red caught my eye:

“He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority.   But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth,” – Acts 1:7-8

I don’t think God could have really spoken any more blatantly to me other than coming straight out of the clouds, into my face, and saying “Sarah, seriously? Get over yourself,”

God has a time and a plan for every day, every hour, every minute, and every second of our time here in Thailand. Who am I to think I can rush the one who called me here in the first place?
I’m not here to call the shots. I’m here to serve Christ and follow His perfectly laid out plan that was woven into my story long before I was born. And if that means waiting for days or even weeks longer, then I’ll wait knowing that when He is ready for us to go, the world is going to tremble and chains will be broken all in the moment we step out with Christ guiding our feet.

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