haste and waiting.

I woke up at 6am this morning--my full bladder and empty stomach were my alarm clock.  I got up and started the coffee, hoping to catch some solitude before Tess woke up.  I'd been toying around with the idea of making hot cross buns for the past few days, and this morning, since I was up so early, I decided to take the plunge.

It's been a long time since I made any type of bread or pastry with yeast. Yeast is such a funny thing to me. It's small and magical, like pixie dust. Plus, it just looks so...fertile. I feel like I might get pregnant just looking at it. I stuck my nose into the small packet and took a whiff.  It smelled like Napa in late October during harvest, when the grapes are fermenting and mysteriously transforming their sugars into alcohol in big steel vats. As I cut open a package and dumped it into my pot, I was pondering a few things.

For one, I find it odd that we traditionally make hot cross buns, a leavened bread, on Good Friday, which is during Passover, which is the Jewish feast of UNleavened bread. I was reading up a bit about Passover this week, and I was reminded of how God told the Israelites not to put yeast in their bread during the week of Passover, because they would not have time to let the bread rise--they needed to be on guard and prepared to leave Egypt in haste when God said it was time. And so, to commemorate how God lead them out of slavery in Egypt, Jewish believers still only eat unleavened bread during the Passover week.  

And then, as a sort of paradox to this, I was also mindful of references that Jesus gave in the Gospels to yeast, particularly Matt 13:33, when He says,

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough."

After I added my yeast and flour to my big pot of milk, oil, and sugar, I waited for an hour to let the yeast do it's thing.  When I came back, my mass of dough was puffy and airy...full of life.  Those little granules of yeast are tiny, but like Jesus was saying, they permeate everything.

Making leavened bread takes time and patience. You can't force it or control it. You can only add the yeast to the dough, set it in a warm place, and let it do it's job.

So I was thinking about the contradiction of these two scenes of Scripture as they pertain to our life right now.

In Exodus, God is telling His people that there is no time to wait. They must move, and they must move NOW. They must act in haste.

And in the Gospels, Jesus is saying that the Kingdom of God has a life of its own...it is mysterious. It will grow slowly and its impact may not be visible to the naked eye, but it will permeate everything. Patience will be a necessity. There will be a lot of work...and there will be an equal amount of waiting.   

Haste.  

Waiting.

Both seem to be an important part in our relationship with God and responding to His Spirit.

Last fall, when Chris and I felt God's strong tug for us to adopt, we prayed a lot about timing. Do we start the process immediately, or do we wait? I felt a sense of urgency in my heart...a sense of haste. Chris didn't feel it like I did, so we took a week to pray hardcore, and we told God that if the time wasn't now, then we wanted to see closed doors.  

There were no closed doors.  

It was as if He was parting our own personal Red Sea, saying "Go ahead, it seems crazy, but I want you to go for it...NOW. Get a move on."

So we took the plunge and trusted that if our sense of discernment was totally jacked up, then God would at some point slam a door.

And now, I'm struck at the contrast of where we are currently sitting, versus where we were four months ago.  Now, most of our work is done.  We are coming down the home stretch of the paper chase, and I'm starting to get the sense that we are out of haste-mode and entering into waiting-mode. Waiting for immigration...waiting for a referral...waiting for China.  

In figurative terms, we have mixed together our ingredients, we have added the yeast, and now all we can do is sit back and watch the mystery unfold.  

Sometimes it's hard to know that you've done all you can do and now it's out of your hands.  But it's freeing, too.  It seems that this is where a lot of faith has to enter in.  

The other day I spoke with our China case manager, Tiffany, and she said that she's been looking for referrals for us, but hasn't found a match yet.  Because of agency protocols, our son must be at least nine months younger than Lucy, which means that he can't be older than seven months right now. Out of the thousands of boys in China's waiting-child database, the youngest ones are around 12-18 months old, which means we could be waiting for a while.  On the other hand, the database gets updated periodically with new children, and the little man who will someday be our son could show up at any time.  

So...we are ready...and we are waiting. It kind of feels like the expression commonly used in the military..."Hurry up and wait."

Sometimes it's hard to live in the existence of these two opposing realities.


I attended a Seized by Hope conference about two years ago.  The speaker at the conference was Jan Meyers, author of The Allure of Hope.  One of the poignant questions she posed to all of the women at the conference was this:


WHO ARE YOU IN THE WAITING?


Jan talked about all the aspects of life that require us to wait--places that we don't have control over--things that we can't fix or change, no matter how hard we try.  Life is full of these sorts of things, and usually, these are the places where we really need God to show up.  These are also the places where we are also tempted to try and do God's job and take more control...and that never seems to end well. 

So, like waiting for the yeast to turn lifeless dough into plump, fluffy buns...I want to sit back and enjoy the beautiful mystery of God's Kingdom at work in and around us come to life, trusting that everything will happen according to His plan and timing...not mine.


Easier said than done.

More thoughts to come on Easter in the next few days, hopefully.

If you'd like to try the hot cross buns, I used this recipe.  And if you do make them, you MUST add cardamom to the cinnamon-sugar mixture. It's one of the best spices in the world.

Are you in a season of haste or waiting right now?