Why Wait?

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses…we do not know what has become of him.” (Exodus 32:1)

Imagine this scenario from the people’s perspective.

Moses has led them out of slavery in Egypt. He is their leader, their judge, and the mouthpiece of their God—the embodiment of everything that might keep them moving forward with purpose. After traveling through the desert, they come to this foreboding mountain. Moses scales it to talk with God. Days pass.

Weeks pass.

These folks are in the middle of nowhere, with scarce resources and no one in authority to articulate a vision for them. They are waiting around for a disappeared leader who may never return—and a rather frightening God who may or may not speak to them. Strangest of all, this is exactly what God wants them to do.

Think of how profoundly countercultural this message is for us moderns.

We keep to-do lists and check off the items to celebrate our progress. We love to be busy, to feel productive. So much information and so many goods are now available in seconds.

In themselves, these are good things. But when they control our lives as they do in this century, it’s easy to lose the ability to wait and wander.

Now imagine what happens if we do wait and wander.

Suddenly we have time to ask deeper questions, like why am I living this way? The “necessities” of modern life look less necessary. The ideas and desires that shape our lives—excessive work, upward mobility, busyness as a virtue—seem vacuous. We start making less room for the urgent and more room for the important, including God.

Once we make room for God, anything can happen.

That may be the ultimate value of the desert experience. Our usual touchstones fall away, and we are left with the one relationship on which everything depends. As we live in that relationship, God produces an entirely different kind of fruit in us. It not only brings us peace of soul, but confronts the go-go culture around us by its very example.

If we live in the desert, then, God can work with us to change our small corner of the world. Is that too much to say? Or could there be truth in it?