Waiting
Many years ago I spent my summers traveling on a wheat harvest crew. We would take our equipment to exotic places like Oklahoma and we would cut wheat like crazy.
Except when we didn’t.
The name of the game in wheat harvest is hurry up and wait because you always have to be ready for the wheat, but the wheat is very often not ready for you. As a result, almost every morning after rushing to the field and preparing our equipment for the day, we would have to wait—usually for the sun to dry up all of the previous night’s dew out of the wheat before we could begin harvesting for the day.
But it was in those long and often frustrating moments of waiting that I discovered something that I would have never learned otherwise. As fields of ripe wheat dry down in the morning sun, the wheat very quietly crackles. It sounds something like rice krispies in milk.
Now if you’ve ever had a time-sensitive job to do, then you know the frustration of having to wait to do it. But nonetheless, one of my favorite memories of those days in my life is of stretching out in the morning sun on top of the cab of my combine, waiting and listening as the wheat very quietly crackled all around me.
One of the things that I am learning about life is that it tends to be pretty complex. There always seems to be something going on that we don’t fully understand, and that can be really frustrating. But if we are willing to look for it, there is oftentimes much that is beautiful in the complexity of it all.
I think about the simple elegance of a ripe field of golden wheat blowing and crackling in a light morning breeze and it makes me wonder how much of the life happening all around us that we never even see. We’ve got stuff to do and places to be, there is no doubt about that. But I wonder about the things that we might be missing as we go. And I wonder what great truths of life we might stumble onto if we took a minute to just slow down and look around.
In the hurry up and wait experiences of my life, I have often placed great value on the hurrying up and had very little patience for the waiting. But I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’ve got that wrong. I’m starting to wonder if some of the greatest things that life has to offer happen in the waiting.
Rather than being an unproductive bother, maybe there is a way of waiting that is the furthest thing from a waste of time. As I think about that, there has to be.
Dozens of times in the Bible, people are called to wait on God. One good example is Psalm 130:5-6:
I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.
So today I’m thinking that maybe sometimes as we chase after life we do too much and we wait too little. But God is the one with the good plan and with the power to make it happen. So let’s do something. Let's make a point together of slowing down, listening to the wheat crackle, and waiting on God to do His thing. If we do that, I am confident that we will not be disappointed.
