God's Waiting Room or Faith Gym?

What do you do after consulting God on an issue, 

and a big part of His answer is or seems to be, "Wait"?

I recently heard (live) a powerful and quite moving speech by Dr. Ronn Elmore (drronn.com) entitled, "Have a Seat in God's Waiting Room". This speech painted a vivid and very entertaining analogy between the experience of waiting in a dentist's office with an awful toothache, and waiting for God to answer urgent prayer. This speech prompted me to ponder the following questions, which may be on your mind, too, if you’ve ever “Had a Seat in God’s Waiting Room” for a protracted period of time:

1. When do I end up in God's waiting room -- before consulting Him on my petition, as with the dentist experience, or afterward? 
2. From God’s perspective, what really constitutes patient waiting? 
3. What to do while in God's so-called waiting room? 

Re. the first point, I readily recognized my waiting room experiences with God are the flip side/opposite of those in typical professional settings. I typically am required to wait after praying. What about you?

Before addressing the remaining points, ponder with me a couple of questions:

• Honestly, when is your faith developed to receive from God the answer to your typical prayer -- before you ask (pray) or afterward? 
• When is your faith to receive the answer most likely to wane? 

The biggest problem we may encounter in God's waiting room may well be the tendency of the devil to manipulate our thinking to focus on ANYTHING BUT the glorious climax -- the manifestation of answered prayer! One of his biggest deceptions may well be prompting us to apply to God's waiting room experiences the 'patient mentality' of our human experiences, e.g., with the medical industry, or other similar professional waiting rooms. I, too, have been duped into believing waiting on manifestation of answered prayers means hunkering down, getting quiet and trying to prove to God and myself "just how patient I can be." After a long while with this approach, the vision and desire would slowly dry up and fade away, to the point that it didn't matter anymore! I gave up; caved in. My vision was D.O.A. (Dead On Application) of the "patient principle", or at least what I thought was patience. It really was slowly giving up the fight.

I now understand more clearly God's ways are so much higher than our ways that it boggles my mind to try to flip the image of the understanding I have about being patient. The concept of patience really speaks to what we "do" while in God's waiting room. This is the place and time our faith may well be on trial, and the devil knows it! This may be when God, in His loving but tough 'faith development' mindset, offers us the opportunity to grow up our faith to receive materially that which He has given spiritually. If so, this is the time to come out fighting, swinging and jabbing with the "S-Word" (The Sword of the Spirit, which is the Spirit's Word!). We do this by increasingly confessing and professing God's promises, listening to them, feeding on them, praying them and meditating on them. We do this until God's promises become our 'new inner reality' over and above the 'temporal actuality' of our current circumstances. As noted in the blog post, "Earth Still Producing After Its Kind" (http://jwootenjr.blogspot.com/2011/09/earth-still-producing-after-its-kind.html), the mind is the biggest planting field of the earth system. The mind and spirit, working together, simply reproduce in actuality the reality we mentally ‘see’ within, spiritually believe, and hold as Truth. Thoughts fed, nourished and spoken are seeds planted, with the resulting fruit assured.

Once this fruit is produced in our spirit, no devil in or from hell can dislodge your 'faith vise' on God's promise. By this, God is incredibly PLEASED! Rather than your vision shriveling up and dying (the devil's wish!), it now has been magnified and has developed exceptionally deep roots that won't easily be dislodged with the slightest pull or push from untoward forces, seen and unseen. This, I have come to understand, is "patience" to God -- quite the contrary to what I originally understood.

I tend to pray in response to needs others or I have, not when my faith to receive is strongest. Do you, too? As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of time in God's so-called "waiting room". Looking at this situation from the flip side, I now see this waiting room is not always where I am assigned to go and wait for God to get everything aligned and carefully worked out before His answer is manifested. Often, it may be more of an assignment for me to "go to the faith gym!", to develop and strengthen my faith to be able to receive my needed answer.

This tendency to do "need-based praying" rather than "faith-based praying" is both inefficient and unproductive. Knowing others and I will have needs that will move me to pray should, in itself, be sufficient wisdom for me to develop, en avance!, faith to receive well before any need materializes. Thus, I need to get ahead of the need-based praying “8 ball”, so to speak.  Do you?

In light of the above, God's waiting room may well be more like a "Faith GYM!". In this case, to help minimize time in His waiting room, before praying…

"Go to the gym, FIRST, thou sluggard!" 

(Takeoff from Proverbs 6:6)

May this concept and the above picture help you, during your waiting experiences, to achieve a sustainable laser-like focus on your end result, musing what God is shaping for your life. As you do, allow the vivid pictures of what you 'see' (the results of your prayers) to ignite within you the fiery desire to fight and overcome any and all obstacles, seen and unseen, to the realization of your vision.

To help anchor this concept in your mind, please accept my challenge to share it with someone. Whatever we share, we retain; and what we teach, we (re)learn.

wOw!! This concept and picture really excite me as I, too, am definitely in God's Waiting Room ... oops, I mean Faith Gym. In fact, that is where I intend to LivE -- deliberately... always in expectancy!

How about you? 

NB: Thanks to BJT for the picture suggestions.