Grace, Not a Shortcut

I PRAYED FOR THE same thing, day and night, for ten years. Those years taught me the one claim this chapter stands on: delay is not dead time, it is formation. While the door stays shut, God is quietly building the person who keeps knocking, and the wilderness a man crosses to reach the answer turns out to be part of the answer. I want to tell you the ten years straight through, because everything I believe about waiting was made in them.

The story begins when I was a young man, not long out of my student years. A conviction took hold of me that I could not shake and could not explain to anyone's satisfaction, my own least of all: my future lay in a country on the other side of the world. The work I believed I was made for could be done nowhere else, an ocean away. And I had no means of getting there. I do not mean the way was hard. I mean I could not have bought the ticket. More than once I went to a travel agent and asked the fare, and the number was more than I could have saved in years of the life I was living.

The agent was kind about it, the way people are kind to someone they are sure they will never see again. So I made a plan that makes me smile now. I would cross by ship instead and work my passage, washing dishes or sweeping floors for the two months the crossing would take. I had no idea whether such work even existed. It was the only process I knew.

So I prayed. For ten years I asked God to open that one door, and I arranged my whole life around the asking. I did not court anyone, though I wanted to marry as much as any young man does. I told the girls I met, with a solemnity that must have been easy to laugh at, that I had to cross the ocean first. My closest friends did laugh. One of them said, "You know why it is called a dream, don't you? Because it only happens when you are asleep." That line went around for years, and it got a laugh every time. I laughed along at first. Around the seventh year it stopped being funny. And heaven, through most of those ten years, said nothing I could hear.

Here is where I did the asking. In those years I ate my first meal of the day at four in the morning, at a food stall on a bridge. The river under the bridge was filthy, because the whole neighborhood used it as a dump, and from where I sat I could hear chickens shrieking as they were slaughtered for the morning market. That bridge was my chapel. I ate in the dark, and then I prayed, and by then my praying had worn down to a single sentence, borrowed from a boy in the Gospels: "Lord, all I have are five loaves and two fish."

You remember the boy. Thousands had followed Jesus up the mountainside with nothing to eat, and Andrew reported the one resource the disciples could locate: "There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are they among so many?" (John 6:9 NKJV). Andrew's arithmetic was my arithmetic on the bridge. Here is what I have; what is it among so many? What was one poor student's praying against an ocean, a fare he could not pay, a country that had never heard of him? But the boy handed his loaves over anyway, and that is what my sentence meant. I was not informing God that the inventory was small; He knew. I was beginning with what I had instead of what I lacked. Start with what you have, not what you lack. The sentence was my way of handing it over, every morning, before the sun came up over the dirty water.

Now let me say plainly what I believe those ten years were. When God does not seem to answer a prayer, He is usually growing the person who prayed it, because He cannot hand a responsibility to someone who is still too weak to carry it. His slowness is the making of a person able to bear the answer, and I know of no other way such a person gets made. For a long time I thought the ten years were a corridor, dead time outside the room where my real life would begin. I now believe they were the room. I did not learn this from my own story first. I learned it from Israel's, and only afterward recognized the bridge in it.

Israel came out of Egypt through a parted sea, carried on a miracle they could never afterward deny. Then God led them into a desert and kept them there forty years, and what the desert uncovered was humiliating. The people had begged for freedom, and freedom promptly exposed the fears that slavery had kept hidden. Hunger turned at once into complaint. Thirst turned into bitterness. Delay turned into murmuring against the very God whose cloud they could see with their own eyes. When the spies came back from Canaan talking about giants, the men who had watched Pharaoh's army drown collapsed in fear. People who had sung on the far shore of the Red Sea began to speak of slavery with something horribly close to homesickness. Slavery, at least, had been predictable. Their bodies had left Egypt. Egypt was still alive in their instincts. Deliverance and readiness are two different works of God, and the second one is slower.

At the end of the forty years, Moses told them plainly what the desert had been for:

And you shall remember that the LORD your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)

Read the verbs slowly. He led you, all the way, every year of it deliberate, none of it wandering as far as God was concerned. To humble you, to test you, to know what was in your heart: the wilderness was an examination, and the subject under examination was the heart. God already knew the results. The heart itself did not, and had to be shown. He allowed you to hunger, and He fed you, and the hunger and the manna came from the same hand and the same love. These people had to learn in their stomachs what they would never have accepted as doctrine, that a human life leans first on the word of God and only then on bread. Forty years of that curriculum turned a mob of freed slaves into a nation that could cross the Jordan and be trusted with a land. The desert was the slow formation of a people able to carry what they had asked God to give.

We use the word readiness far too lightly. I think of Israel's examination whenever somebody at a conference or a retreat calls out, "Are you ready?" and the hands go up and the voices answer yes, we are ready. I never doubt the sincerity for a moment. I have also never once heard a room answer no. What I doubt is the definition. We imagine readiness as a feeling, a surge of confidence or courage or spiritual warmth, and we assume that once the feeling arrives we are prepared for the blessing, the ministry, the answer we have been asking for. Scripture unfolds readiness far more painfully than that.

Readiness, in the Kingdom of God, is rarely about competence. It is the capacity to carry without crumbling, to lead without grasping, to create without being owned by what you make. Heaven does not entrust weight to a soul that cannot bear it. A man prays for leadership while remaining unwilling to endure the discipline, the misunderstanding, and the loneliness in which leadership is formed. Someone prays for influence and stays fragile before the mildest criticism. Someone prays for a great ministry while still checking, after every small one, whether anyone applauded. If a man prays for a company to be entrusted to him, wisdom and endurance are not poured into him overnight along with the keys. He must still walk through rejection, exhaustion, and the long hidden labor by which a soul acquires substance.

Once you see this, your own delays begin to read differently. The answer to a prayer usually begins long before the prayer looks fulfilled. The training, the wilderness, the delay itself are already part of the answer, the way a foundation is already part of the house, and the burden God intends to give you is shaping, even now, the shoulders that will have to carry it. That is why, in His mercy, He permits roads that wound our confidence, expose our illusions, and dismantle the flattering pictures we keep of ourselves. He takes no pleasure in the wounding, and I want that said clearly, because some of you have been taught to picture a God who enjoys watching you wait. But responsibilities have weight, and weight crushes whatever lacks depth, and He loves us too much to let the gift destroy its receiver.

I can name some of what the ten years did in me, now that they are decades behind me. They taught me to live on little and waste nothing, which counted for far more later than I could have guessed. They taught me to work while I waited. I finished my studies, I took what work there was, I kept my hands moving, because the waiting God honors has never been idleness in a line. And they broke a certainty in me that badly needed breaking. In those years I was sure of the whole script: sure God would send me, sure of what I would accomplish once I arrived, sure of how the story would run to the last page of my life.

Some of those certainties were honored. Some never were. Part of the desert's work was teaching me to tell the difference between trusting God and trusting my script for God. The two feel identical from the inside. Only the wilderness tells them apart, because the wilderness burns the script and leaves you standing there with God Himself, finding out whether He was what you wanted all along. I have come to think one of the most dangerous conditions a soul can reach is a certainty so complete that God can no longer surprise it or correct it.

I would love to tell you I prayed nobly through all of it. I did not. On many of those dark mornings, what I actually wanted from God was a shortcut. I wanted the door blown open, the ten years compressed to ten weeks, the bridge and the river and the shrieking chickens edited out of my story. There is a prayer I learned much later, and I wish I had learned it on the bridge.

Give me grace, O Lord, not a shortcut.

Shortcuts, I have come to see, are illusions. They promise relief, but they rob us of becoming. They offer speed, but they steal depth. In God's economy the length of the road is not a punishment but a process. A man who walks with God often travels a longer road than those who do not, through country he is never asked to explain. And the extra distance does work a straight road never could. It chisels away pride, strips away illusions, and slowly presses the traveler into the mold of Christ.

The detours we despise are not accidents but appointments. Grace is not the absence of difficulty; it is God's presence in the middle of it. It carries the traveler the whole length of the road, teaching him to trust when he does not understand and to hope when the road looks endless. In one short life, if each of us had to walk every road we were meant to, none of us would reach the destination.

If that sounds like a clergyman romanticizing hardship, check it against Christ Himself. He was offered shortcuts, more than one, and He took none of them. He did not come down from the cross, though He could have, though the crowd taunted Him to do it. He walked the whole road of His suffering to its end, and our salvation lies at the end of that unshortened road. I do not see how a disciple can request a bypass the Master refused. Faith was never a transaction, God delivering in full the moment I believed hard enough. It is the posture that keeps building the ark nail by nail with the flood nowhere in sight, and the grace He loves to give is the strength to keep hammering.

Now let me tell you how the door finally opened. God's timing has a sense of humor for which ten years of solemn praying had entirely failed to prepare me. My studies were finished and the door was still shut. In the meantime I had begun a small piece of work with a friend studying abroad, a friend who had written to me out of nowhere after years of silence. We built the thing together across the ocean, by letters and telephone calls, and the distance had become so ordinary to us that I had stopped noticing it. One day he announced that he wanted to come and visit me.

"Why?" I asked him. "We can finish this the way we started it, by mail and by phone."

"I just want to complete it alongside you," he said. I answered with a joke. "Instead of you coming all this way to me, why don't I just come to you?" He was quiet for a moment, and then he declined to treat it as a joke. He knew about the ten years; I had never made a secret of them. Go, he said, and ask for the permission properly, and tell them plainly what you intend. I will stand behind you and answer for your stay. And if they say yes, the ticket is mine to buy. They said yes. He bought the ticket. After a decade of imagining ships, dishwater, and two months of working my passage, I crossed the ocean in a single day. I paid no fare. The door was held open by a hand I had never thought to pray for. Not one element of my imagined process was used. I had spent ten years rehearsing the mechanics of an answer, the way the man at the pool of Bethesda spent thirty-eight years rehearsing the stirring of the water and the race to it he always lost. When the answer finally came, it walked up beside the whole system and quietly ignored it.

The ten years of that waiting have their verse in Isaiah, one people embroider on cushions, and I understand why, since it is beautiful. What is less noticed is how precise it is:

But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)

Notice where the renewing happens. It happens in the waiting, to those who wait, before any running or mounting up is mentioned. Notice, too, what the waiting is fastened to. Those who wait on the LORD wait on Him, on His character, on His word. That is a wholly different posture from waiting for an outcome with God's name pinned to it. Outcome-waiting drains a soul by the month, and I have done enough of it to testify. Waiting on the LORD belongs to a stranger economy, one in which strength arrives during the delay instead of after it. The man who comes out of the wilderness is stronger than the man who went in, though everything visible about a wilderness should have worn him down to nothing.

Here is the thing I most want to tell you about the day the answer came. When I finally boarded that airplane, I felt almost none of what I had spent ten years expecting to feel. There were no trumpets. What I felt was a deep and quiet recognition, the sensation of a key sliding into the lock it was cut for. On the far side of the ocean I knew one soul, and everything the bridge had built into me was needed there: the thrift, the discipline, the habit of praying in the dark, the trust that had learned to survive laughter. Every piece of it was spent, and none of it was wasted. The man the waiting had made turned out to be the man the answer required. I have said it since in the one form I still believe. When the answer to your prayer comes, it will not feel like a rescue. It will feel like a confirmation of who you have become in the waiting. That is grace. And grace is never late.

I want to be careful with this story, because I know where it may find you. Some of you have been waiting longer than ten years. Some of you are waiting for something no travel agent can price: a healing, a reconciliation, a child. Some prayers receive a lifelong No rather than a slow Yes, and I have carried one of those myself; this chapter does not pretend to answer them. What I can put into your hands today is Paul's sentence to the Galatians: "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart" (Galatians 6:9).

Read the fine print of that promise, because for once the fine print is the good news. The reaping is guaranteed. The season is unspecified. Due season is the clause God keeps in His own hand, and everything in this chapter is my testimony about why He holds it. The season comes due when the person is ready, and He is making the person the whole time, in the dark, before dawn, on whatever bridge you are eating your bread this morning.

There is one more honesty I owe you before we leave that bridge. The ten years held mornings I have not described, mornings when the praying itself was the heaviest thing I carried up those steps, and no book I owned had warned me they were coming. What made those mornings heavy has a plain name, and a praying life cannot go much further until we say it out loud: disappointment.