The War Is Won in the Waiting

A lot of us seem to live most of our lives in the big moments – a series of peaks and valleys.  I know I do, and not just spiritually.  In everyday life, we talk about stress and vacations, pressure and playful recreation.  I experienced plenty of that while teaching school – the nightmare schedule of class prep, homework grading, instructional time, meetings, discipline, and relationship building that kept me on a run from 7:30 a.m. to late in the evening.  Then I would collapse into bed, only to start again the next day.  I lived for the weekends, holidays, and especially summer, where I would cram in as much fun time as I could around the daily chores.  That is not to say that teaching didn’t have its moments.  It did – moments when the kids and I had an especially fun class and got some good bonding time in, or moments when the light finally came on and they understood.  But it was mountaintops and valleys.  There was very little calm, in-between time.  Even when it was good, it was just so big and busy.  I struggled to find a few moments to breathe and be calm.  I know you experience it, too, in your own day-to-day.  Maybe it is the never-ending job of cooking, cleaning, and caring for a house and family.  Maybe it is being a full-time caregiver to an aging parent.  Maybe it is your own version of a stressful career.  Americans are especially plagued with working ourselves to exhaustion.

Those times are life-giving, sustaining, and sacred.

After a while, you begin to realize how unhealthy that is – the constant rushing and doing and serving, only to collapse in exhaustion when you have some down time.  You begin to try to carve out niches of time for yourself where you can just be in the moment – present, calm, and in balance.  Once you develop the habit of finding those times, you begin to realize that those are the times that carry you through.  They are the times when you care for and heal yourself – when you build up strength for the next battle and unwind from the last one.  Those times are life-giving, sustaining, and sacred.  The need for those times of calm and balance has created an entire industry in world of yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, calming apps, and other devices to just get connected with ourselves and become stable.

I need to remember that the war is won in the in-between – in the waiting.

What I find so interesting is that we can recognize the in-between times as a necessary and good reality in daily life, but when we think about it in a spiritual sense, everything seems different.  It seems that only in the spiritual realm do we talk about going from mountains to valleys and back again as if it is normal.  It almost seems as if we expect our religious lives to be a holy version of a rollercoaster.  And the in-between times?  We call that waiting – and we talk expansively about how hard those times of waiting are.  I have been caught in this trap.  I love the mountain tops.  I get to relish being out there, doing the work of God – work that feels so important and so fulfilling, and so busy!  I see Him working and I see things happen I would never have imagined.  It is a complete adrenaline rush.  Then, I go into a valley.  The adrenaline wears off, the exhaustion sets in, the people working side-by-side with me have gone back to their homes, and I am back to the hum-drum.  It is a letdown after all the excitement.  This is usually the point when I realize the not-so-great things going on in my life.  The problems, the pain, the brokenness.  I hit a valley and cry out to God for His help and healing.  When I get rested up and get back to a better perspective, I enter the period of waiting.  I press ahead, getting the mundane things of life accomplished, while trying to attend to my daily spiritual growth, not seeing immediate results in the spiritual realm, but hoping and waiting for that next mountaintop.  And that is where many of us who have entered this life of Christian service find ourselves most of the time.  Waiting for the next big mountain top.  And there is nothing that most of us hate more than having to wait.  What I realized this week is I need to treat my spiritual life more like I treat my secular existence – my day-to-day world.    I need to remember that the war is won in the in-between – in the waiting.

We will hit a valley, and unless the armor we have put on is strong and thick, we will lose the battle.

It makes me think of Ephesians 6:10-18 – the famous “armor of God” section of scripture.  The thought of putting on the armor and going into spiritual battle is exciting, isn’t it?  Fighting for the good, clothed in the armor and weapon of the Spirit, doing something important.  Yes, there is some fear there, too.  After all, a battle is still a battle, even if it is more spiritual than physical.  But fear is part of what gets the adrenaline pumping and makes it exciting.  We love to see the pictures of the Roman armor that Christians use when they teach these verses.  We see the power of God in every piece and history has shown time after time that the best equipped armies are the ones that win.  How can you get better equipped than by God? Then we hit a battle.  It might be a hard conversation with a neighbor who needs to hear about Jesus.  It might be taking a stand against an unrighteousness policy that goes against the Word of God.  Or it might be spending time as prayer warriors for someone who needs help or healing but the answers aren’t coming.   If we have strong armor and some perseverance, it may go well.  More likely than not, the initial adrenaline will wear off and we will be in a long period of waiting, continuing to talk, fight, and pray, long after all the excitement, and most of the people who initially joined us, have disappeared.  We will hit a valley, and unless the armor we have put on is strong and thick, we will lose the battle. 

The war was won or lost months ahead of time because of how well the armor was constructed in the in-between times.

What we don’t stop to realize is that the armor that wins the war wasn’t built on the battlefield.  It was built long before the battle even started, slowly and carefully and with hours of work.  The building of physical armor is a boring, tedious, time-consuming job.  It is a period of long waiting.  I researched how long those suits of Roman armor, shields, and swords took to make.  At first, people made their own armor.  Just the breastplates took at least 60 hours, and those were much easier to make than the carefully balanced and sharpened swords.  When you add in the helmets, shields, belts, shoes, and all the rest, it could easily take 500 – 700 hours of labor.  If you took our normal work week of 40 hours, that would be 3 or 4 months!  Eventually, the Roman armies needed so many men, they began drafting people and had to provide the armor for those people themselves.  In order to get enough, the army started cutting corners.  As a result, they become less effective at winning the battles.  Their men were too easily killed.  The war was won or lost months ahead of time because of how well the armor was constructed in the in-between times.

In those times of silence and aloneness and inactivity, when no one is watching us, we show how thick our armor really is.

The same is true of spiritual armor.  You can’t expect your life to be one exciting spiritual high after another without the preparation time in between where the armor is constructed.  Knowing that, I have to ask myself if I have been looking at the waiting period all wrong.  I am building that armor.  I am gaining the strength to get through the hard and stressful times, and even the exciting times.  All of those really good attributes we read in Ephesians 6 – truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the Word of God – will fall apart under the stress of battle if we haven’t taken the time to build them up in between.  In those times of silence and aloneness and inactivity, when no one is watching us and no one is telling us our next step, we show how thick our armor really is.  If we cannot be honest, strive to be righteous, have peace alone with God, practice our own faith outside of others, be sure of our own salvation, and have a good knowledge of scripture from our own Bible reading, when we are alone and safe, we will be sure to have it all fall apart when the emotions are high and the adrenaline is pumping.  The war is won in the in-between times because that is when the battle armor is built.

I want to win my war before I even see the battlefield approaching.

I am trying to change how I view the waiting.  Just as I relished moments to work on myself and get rested, strengthened, and uplifted between teaching days, I want to relish the time alone with God to get strengthened, healed, sanctified, and uplifted through prayer and through studying His word.  I want to get used to the feel of the sword of scripture before I have to swing it at the demons that I will face at times in my life.  I want to know the sweet peace of communion with God before the next round of chaos begins.  I want to have faith, truth, and righteousness define me, even if no one else notices, because then they will define me when everyone is watching.  I want to win my war before I even see the battlefield approaching.

I hope today’s message touched your heart, increased your understanding, and encouraged you.  Praying the peace and comfort of Christ Jesus on your life.