The Quick Fix
We are a culture of quick fixes (and short attention spans…do your best to stick with me on this somewhat lengthy reflection). Speed and convenience are seen as suitable markers of progress. We thrive on fast cars, fast food, fast internet, and fast entertainment. If we want something, we want it now.
What I often fail to realize is how much this cultural obsession with speed affects the requests I lay before the Father—and my expectations as to the fulfillment of those requests. Take this past week for example: I went to bed last Monday night with swollen throat and high fever and my request was “heal me”. I wanted to be able to wake up Tuesday morning feeling miraculously better so that I could go about my oh-so-important business. Because heaven knows, the world just stops spinning if I’m not there to hold it up. I had classes to teach, and appointments with students. But guess what, the world kept turning without me, the classes will be made up this week, and my presence is not ultimately vital to the well being of this city.
But (as usual), I digress. The simple fact is that with my quick fix mentality and requests, I often fail to see the miraculous ways in which the Father very patiently and actively is answering me. I fail to see his activity in the fact that my body’s immune system knows how to attack the infection within me, in my body’s initiation (apart from any mental command of my own) of the coughing reflex to clear out the junk in my lungs, and in my body’s massive production of snot to clear out all the nasty little bugs in me. From the prior description, you can see I failed to follow the family path down the biological sciences. Should I have followed that path I might have been able to give a much more profound and detailed description of the workings of our body. Sadly, you will have to be content with my elementary understanding of biology.
However, the miracles become even more breath taking when you consider our requests in regard to people. Often when I petition for others I expect the small, instantaneous, surface level miracle. I forget that the greatest miracle is not that our Father works as a grand puppet master, forcibly moving beings at his whim and fancy—the miracle is that He takes the pain-stakingly long and arduous path of working in flesh. Of molding, calling, breaking, changing, and sculpting until that flesh is suited to His will and calling. And so His “Yes” to our requests can take days, weeks, months, years, decades to be completely fulfilled. But as they come to fruition, would we but have eyes open to see more than the quick fix, we would stand in awestruck wonder at the long-suffering, miracle-working, answering One we serve. The One who didn’t send a savior marching in on clouds of glory for the quick fix, but as a fetus slowly growing in a womb, slowly learning to walk and talk, slowly marching towards calvary.
Thanks for the great reminder…I love what you wrote: “…Of molding, calling, breaking, changing, and sculpting until that flesh is suited to His will and calling. And so His “Yes” to our requests can take days, weeks, months, years, decades to be completely fulfilled. But as they come to fruition, would we but have eyes open to see more than the quick fix, we would stand in awestruck wonder at the long-suffering, miracle-working, answering One we serve….”
I’ve been pondering on this recently too — and have been convicted of not trusting. Hope the cold is slowly dying down and the trees are starting to bloom. by the way, on the topic of trees blooming, I love Habbakkuk 3:1-18!
cheers