My eldest daughter laughed at me recently, after we had enjoyed a wonderful dinner together, and she knew that I was heading home to put the finishing touches on a blog post.  “What’s it on this week, Mom?”  Nodding at the cartons still on her table, she said “Don’t tell me… Chinese food?”  

Admittedly, I tucked that little snip it away and said, “Hmmm… Maybe I could use that sometime!”  Certainly, there has to be something about a good plate of chicken lo mien that God could use to speak to us through.  I’m still working on that one.

As the welcome mat of Fall lays at my front door, I am grateful for the season that brings forth the color in the trees, fire pit closeness, the early promise of the holidays.  It has always been my favorite time of year.  And with it, almost like clockwork, I draw out my big cast iron pot and officially inaugurate the cooler weather with an old fashioned stew.

As one might guess, I do find the making of it, to be something of a spiritual experience.  

First all, making a good stew takes time.  It takes patience to trim good beef down to tender, bite-sized pieces.  Then there’s the chopping and dicing of onions, carrots and potatoes, the browning and tenderizing the meat.  Adding the right seasonings, stock, and tomato paste, at just the right ratios, has taken years to perfect.  Add a good bread as a side, and you get the picture.

After a few hours simmering on the stove, hopefully, the whole thing comes together.

The thing about stew, however, is that it always tastes better the next day.  After it cooks, the flavors need to blend, the vegetables soften, and the meat needs to absorb all the richness of the broth.  After cooking, it needs time to rest, to process, to find its peak potential.  

And so it is with us.

When we are in transition, when we are praying, seeking, and believing God to move, we are not unlike a good stew.  We are sliced and diced, put through the searing and the stirring, we are thrown raw into a process that takes time to change us.  We can do all the right things, have the best of intentions and ingredients.  But it is in the part of the process that we can do nothing but wait, where the most is accomplished.  

One of my favorite Scriptures is, “Be still and know that I am God.”  When I am anxious, when fear rises up in me, when the “what if…” scenarios wake me up at night, I know that I must respond by knowing that I have done all that I know how to do.   What will come next is not by my hand, but His. It will happen outside my control, without my help. It happens when I give it time to rest. 

God has a way of blending all that we are going through, absorbing the hard parts, tossing in just the right amounts of faith and grace and mercy.  He seasons our situations with people who encourage us, pray for us, help us to understand that in the heat of our circumstances, God is at work even when we don’t see him.  

What is difficult to realize in the gap, when it seems we are thrown into one thing after another, is that it takes stirring it all together for the outcome to create something brand new. The chopping, the dicing, the searing — all have a purpose.

There are no short cuts. We cannot order our new seasons like Chinese take-out.  We can’t live life like a flash in the pan, compromising our virtues, seeking out instant gratification, and then expect God to bless it.  

God seeks our hearts, our obedience, our faith.  He wants to see us going through the heat of what is hard, with the knowing that within it, He is transforming us and our lives into more than we can hope for or imagine.

You already know that this takes great patience.  You know too, that this can make us weary.  But in this place, even before we can taste or see what is coming, we find our greatest peace.

God wants you to know that He sees you doing the work.  He knows what you are going through.  He hears you, He loves you.  He knows that it is hard to wait.

It is in the waiting, that He does His greatest work.

Rest.