Oct 18 2021 Day 206 Jeremiah 39:1–45:5

At the end of ten days the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah.



When reading Scripture, it’s easy to lose track of time. By that I mean that it’s easy to forget what time is passing in the stories I read. Jeremiah’s woes and prophesies must take years to unfold. But since I’m reading it in bits over the course of a few weeks, I forget the time that passes in his narrative. Even when you read about years passing, I forget that their years are just like my years. A year is a long time in my world, and when I read something about a year in their time, again, it doesn’t seem have the same duration as my years.

Except when I read that something took 10 days. For whatever reason, that feels like my own measurement of 10 days. That makes the story relatable in my sense of time.

At the end of 10 days, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. I don’t know what Jeremiah was doing for those 10 days, but he had been told that the word of the Lord would come to him, so I can imagine he was waiting. Was he sitting on a park bench, looking up at the sky, waiting? Was he kneeling, deep in prayer for 10 days? Whatever he was doing, 10 days feels like a long time to wait for a promised word of God.

If God said he was going to send God’s word to me, I would impatiently wait, after about 10 minutes. I’m waiting. Any time now.

This morning, I’m thinking about my ignorance and impatience at time. Things in Scripture took a long time, even though we read through the stories much quicker. Forty years in the wilderness. Three days in the belly of the fish. Ten days awaiting the Lord’s word. I’m not suggesting that all of these things are literally and equally the time I’m familiar with, but I do think that the time described in scripture is relevant to the story. 40 years was about the time it took a generation to pass away, it’s a long time. Ten days waiting for the Lord’s word is far more than 20 minutes. I need to pay more attention to the times listed in scripture and consider what that time means to the story, and what it means in my world.

More important, I need to get over my sense of impatience. Things don’t need to happen immediately. I don’t need to get frustrated when they don’t happen as I think they should. There’s beauty in waiting. There can definitely be peace in waiting, with the right attitude. And sometimes, things are delayed because things wouldn’t work out in my rushed immediate sense of things.

For example, I started the education and formation process to get ordained when my kids were little. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to serve at church, when my kids were familiar and known at our home parish. My husband doesn’t attend church, so it all rested on me to get them to church. The kids didn’t sign up to work on Sunday mornings, so I couldn’t very well make them sit through two services at an unfamiliar church. Whatever will I do? As it turned out, but the time I was ready to be assigned to a church, that problem had vanished. The kids were old enough to come with me sometimes, go to our home church sometimes, and in either case, drive themselves. The waiting actually solved my problem.

Today, I’m going to try to recognize my impatience, and see what else I might do during those periods of waiting.