DRY TIMES

These 40 days and nights of Lent are meant as preparation for the glorious promise of Easter fulfilled. We have much cause to rejoice even as we wait.

In our lives, or in my own life at least, sometimes the dry time has exceeded the 40-day formula, and the likely outcomes were mostly fearful. A critically and mortally ill child, cancer of a spouse, onset of a chronic and irreversible illness have been part of those dry times. I spent days just trying to make it through, of barely holding on to faith at the very margins. No instant resolution, and often sparse hope of a positive outcome.

How to make it through? In such times, we have an opportunity to express a new level of faithfulness. Faith that God is God, and God is good, and we have God's eternal goodness to hold onto no matter what happens in the world. A pastor once told me that when all is said and done, God is unlikely to see us through our successes, but rather through our faithfulness.

Prayer connects us to the power greater than ourselves. I have found it helpful in the dry times to pray and envision holding the person and situation of concern up in my hands before a bright and colorful light of God's love. Since God is all-knowing, we need not fill the time with words – our prayers of the heart are known before we even find words.

On my first visit to a Benedictine Priory on a cold early morning in Vermont, I heard the brothers sing:

“We go on waiting, knowing you have come;
yet we are not ready to be transformed.
Give us your spirit and we'll carry on.
The day is long ahead of us
and we'll carry on, and we'll carry on.”

I recall thinking that if these cloistered brothers are waiting to be transformed, then maybe I need to rethink my own impatience. All in God's time and in God's way, which are not our ways or our timing.

— Joe Matney

Courtesy of The Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist