The discipline of waiting

Follow a recipe for baking bread, and you’ll see that in step 5 you have to wait for your bread to rise. Only for a few moments, but you must wait or you risk ruining the bread. Unfortunately, this is only the first of two climbs. In step 7, you have to wait ten more times for the second upload.

Oh, but you hate waiting! You have places to go and things to do. Your time is precious to you. But, you want freshly baked bread, so you wait for it to rise before completing the eighth and final step: baking the bread. You should wait 30 to 40 minutes during baking. Agony! Maybe it really doesn’t have to bake that long? You can smell the delicious fragrance of the bread as it bakes in your oven. In your mind, you drip melted butter over your golden-brown culinary creation, then plunge your mouth into it with ravenous abandon of teeth. Hmm! No, wait… Yuck! Your bread tastes like dough and looks like a deflated soccer ball.

He didn’t wait long enough during the second ascent. Baking killed the yeast before the bread rose. The flavor you wanted had no chance to catch up with the fragrance emanating from your oven. In almost all recipes that involve the combination of fresh ingredients and those that require cooking, exact measurements, purity, and the patience to wait during certain steps are necessary if you do not want to incur unlimited risk of final palate failure. product.

Did you know that beyond food preparation, the value of waiting applies to most topics? You wait in a traffic line because something happened on the road that needs to be fixed; the road is not safe now. You wait for days while a loan officer reviews your home loan application. The officer may determine that you do not qualify for the loan (you cannot make such a high monthly payment). If the officer had not taken the time to apply the proper checks and balances, he may have purchased a home with costs beyond his means. In the military, a soldier learns to accept long waits during movement as time to rest, socialize with other soldiers, and call home. On the battlefield, a plan coupled with ways and means will be best executed if soldiers wait for the enemy to forget they are there (they no longer expect an attack).

In a verse from the Christian Bible, Jesus is quoted as telling his disciples, “My Father (God) will give you whatever you ask in my name.” (John 16:23). The context for the disciples, and for all of us, is that they (we) must talk to God many times a day (prayer), to show him that we believe in him and trust him. Being good and merciful, God gives what they want to those who acknowledge him, but only when he knows that what we ask for is good for us.

In more than 100 scriptures in the Bible, we are told to ask, to trust the promise Jesus made, and to expect God to answer our prayer. The key is to ask for what is pleasing to God (did you ask for something in Jesus’ name?), something selfless, and something that might help another person to know God. After that, waiting means for him that you believe that he will give you his grace (what you asked for) and that you will never stop believing it, even if it takes years. You will know when God answers your prayer. You may never know the calamity you avoided by faithfully waiting for God to answer you. when you were ready to have the answer.