The 'and' Factor

How big is your ‘and?’ Do you ever feel like your ‘and’ is longer than everybody else’s? You think you have it all figured out, but then something else happens, or actually something doesn’t happen, and you question it again? Sometimes the ‘and’ can seemingly take forever!
And, is a conjunction. It links two clauses in a sentence. That’s important because we read Bible passages and take two clauses and make them one, totally ignoring the all important ‘and.’
In the book of St. John it says, “Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” We read that and we get all excited and ask, and wait. Then we ask again, and wait. We wonder why nothing is happening so we dive into the bible to see if we have the right code or combination to make it all work out. Of course, after you do this once or twice, you realize that God can’t be figured out, and on top of that, there seems to be no one secret ‘code’ to make God work his Heavenly miracles. The simple truth of the matter is that some times we are just in the middle of our ‘and.’
I’m sure that tid-bit of information does not make your six month wait any easier to swallow, but if you swallow it with a dose of sand it just might. Imagine, the children of Israel wandered around in the wilderness (dessert) for forty years. To me that sounds like a really big ‘and.’ What they had prayed for in Egypt was coming to pass, it was just taking a really long time to walk through their own ‘and.’ Their long wait was based one their own poor attitude. The real trip would have only taken roughly seven days. Imagine how messed up they got in just seven days that God had to detour them from the promise land.
Realistically we need to look at our own lives as we walk through our ‘and.’ As we wait from asking, to receiving. Not all the time, but many times we will find that the waiting process is really a purifying process. God is trying to work things out in us.
Imagine if you prayed for success in a certain area. Then ‘poof’ God answered your prayer overnight. You were an instant success. You would probably thank God for the first hour, but then your human nature would kick in and you would think you had actually done something special to deserve or earn this new successful standing.
God has an incredible way of knowing what is in our hearts even before we do. He is more interested in the outcome than the time frame. He is patient; we are not. We get in our Egypt and ask God to respond now! Then he helps walk us through that big fat ‘and’, and we balk and say, “Come on God where are you?” We complain. Really, we were born complainers.
The Children of Israel were led through the dessert by a towering pillar of fire. Pretty Sci-Fi wouldn’t you say? Yet they still cried out, “Where are you God?” I read stuff like that and I want to reach into the Bible and snatch those Israelite bald-headed. It’s like, “Hey idiot! Your God is right there in a towering flame!” So obvious.
Then we turn that same intuitive gaze to our own lives and God is just as obvious. Just as present, but we are so focused on getting this one specific prayer answered that we are missing the hand of God in all the other vitals areas of our lives. We ask for something, and while we are walking through the ‘and’ process we only focus on that one thing while God is molding, shaping, and rejuvenating hundreds of other areas in our lives.
In life we all have to walk through our personal ‘and’ times, but in those times we can’t contract tunnel vision. We need to look up and realize that God is not just at work in our lives, he is leading us through those wide-open ‘and’ times.