When You are Stuck in the Prison of Your Soul or I HATE to WAIT!!!

Genesis 41:1 "Two years passed…” After Joseph had interpreted the dreams of the baker and butler and the butler had been restored to his job, promising Joseph that if it all came true he would tell Pharaoh about him, the butler was reinstated and then...promptly forgot about Joseph—so the next verse starts with “Two years passed…” Two years! PASSED! While Joseph sat in prison!

Interesting that the Bible inserts those words. Two years passed. We have nothing recorded about Joseph’s life during those two years. We can only assume that it was lived the way the previous years had been lived because of what we see AFTER the two years. How had he lived? Gen 39: 20 So he took Joseph and threw him into the prison where the king’s prisoners were held, and there he remained. 21 But the Lord was with Joseph in the prison and showed him his faithful love. And the Lord made Joseph a favorite with the prison warden. 22 Before long, the warden put Joseph in charge of all the other prisoners and over everything that happened in the prison. 23 The warden had no more worries, because Joseph took care of everything. The Lord was with him and caused everything he did to succeed.

"But I don’t LIKE to wait." Neither did Joseph. "Well, if my story ended up like Joseph’s I wouldn’t mind the waiting so much." Joseph had NO CLUE how his story would end up. He just found himself stuck in “wait” mode. He must have wondered a million times if he would ever get out of prison and be able to fulfill some of his goals and dreams for his life…even if they were to be spent as a slave. He could at least work to be head of the household.

No. I think Joseph must have gotten pretty tired of the waiting. Two years passed. Two years! But God hadn’t forgotten about Joseph. He had greater plans and Joseph’s character would have to be equal to the task. Like a blacksmith forging his iron, or a glassblower who knows just exactly when to take the glass out of the flames, God knew what it would take to bring Joseph’s character to be strengthened equal to the task. He knew that Joseph would have to be able to wield power carefully. God knew that Joseph would have to be kind. He knew that Joseph would need to be wise and that ultimately, Joseph would be able to preserve his family instead of annihilate them because of unresolved hatred. God knew that Joseph would have to be able to forgive.

So maybe you find yourself in the waiting period. Nothing seems to be moving. Your career. Stuck. Your passion. Gone. Relationships. Stagnate. Two years pass. Maybe 5. And you wait. And wait. How do you deal with the wait?

I have been there. Waiting. My soul passionless. Sometimes even the food I ate tasting bland and grey. No aliveness in my soul nor song in my heart. Unable to feel all but the strongest of emotions: mainly anger. Waiting and praying that God would somehow, someway deliver me from the prison of myself. My job as a pastor was crushing at times, seeking to bring hope to those that God brought to me while the grey in my soul was eating me alive. Week after week, month after month, year after year, writing sermons, counseling, giving Bible studies, planning and executing mission trips to Appalachia, seeking to keep hope alive in my own soul and my spiritual nose above water.

To be sure, there were some times better than others. There were times when it seemed like I would be getting out of this soul prison. It would seem that the door were starting to finally swing open and new hope would spring forth, but just as quickly, something would happen that would slam the door in my face. The death of friends and family members through cancer, heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, plane crashes and sometimes, even old age, all of these stretched out on my life line to slam the cell door of my soul back in my face.

I read a story once, about Mother Theresa saying that she had gone 22 years without hearing a word from God. She called it her “dark night of the soul” experience. She was asked, “How in the world did you keep going when you felt God was so distant?” Her response stunned me. She reportedly answered, “I just kept going back to the last place I KNEW I heard God speaking to me and sought to be obedient to that."

So how do I endure the waiting, especially not knowing how long it will last? I think it is found in the same way. It is in my belief that God is in control and that it isn’t so much what happens to me, but IN ME, that matters. Somehow I keep going back to the time where I KNOW I heard God speaking to me distinctly and I, like Joseph, like Mother Theresa, seek to be obedient to that until I next hear God change my calling.

And so I continue to wait. Totally dependent upon Grace to help me administer grace to the graceless, hope to the hopeless, help me write sermons and give counsel and dispense wisdom that calls people back to God. Grace that gives me strength for the journey, not knowing if today I will be in the cell, or suddenly promoted to the palace. To be sure—I rest in HIS promise: 2Cor. 12:9 NLT Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.

Two years passed… how will YOU wait?

Use What You've Got!

Craig Brian Larson, in his book Pastoral Grit: the Strength to Stand and to Stay shares an interesting story.  He writes:

In 1972, NASA launched the exploratory space probe Pioneer 10. According to Leon Jaroff in Time, the satellite's primary mission was to reach Jupiter, photograph the planet and its moons, and beam data to earth about Jupiter's magnetic field, radiation belts, and atmosphere. Scientists regarded this as a bold plan, for at that time no earth satellite had ever gone beyond Mars, and they feared the asteroid belt would destroy the satellite before it could reach its target. But Pioneer 10 accomplished its mission and much, much more. Swinging past the giant planet in November 1973, Jupiter's immense gravity hurled Pioneer 10 at a higher rate of speed toward the edge of the solar system. At one billion miles from the sun, Pioneer 10 passed Saturn. At some two billion miles, it hurtled past Uranus; Neptune at nearly three billion miles; Pluto at almost four billion miles. By 1997, twenty-five years after its launch, Pioneer 10 was more than six billion miles from the sun.

And despite that immense distance, Pioneer 10 continued to beam back radio signals to scientists on Earth. "Perhaps most remarkable," writes Jaroff, "those signals emanate from an 8-watt transmitter, which radiates about as much power as a bedroom night light, and takes more than nine hours to reach Earth.'" The Little Satellite That Could was not qualified to do what it did. Engineers designed Pioneer 10 with a useful life of just three years. But it kept going and going. By simple longevity, its tiny 8-watt transmitter radio accomplished more than anyone thought possible.

Cool story pastor, but what does that have to do with me?  I’m glad you asked.  You may look around you and feel like people who can do the job much better surround you.  You may not feel you have anything to offer.  Perhaps you feel like you are too insignificant or too wounded or too weak or too whatever.  But did you know that when we offer ourselves to serve the Lord, He can work even through someone with 8-watt abilities?   Consider this as well.  God can do no work through someone who is always inward looking or who quits.

If you’ve only got 8 watts worth of abilities…fire up all eight watts and watch what God can do!  Be willing to be used.


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Note:  This is from NASA's site on Pioneer 10:

Pioneer 10 was built by TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, Calif., and was launched March 2, 1972, on a three-stage Atlas-Centaur rocket. Pioneer 10 reached a speed of 32,400 mph needed for the flight to Jupiter, making it the fastest human-made object to leave the Earth; fast enough to pass the moon in 11 hours and to cross Mars’ orbit, about 50 million miles away, in just 12 weeks.

On July 15, 1972, Pioneer 10 entered the asteroid belt, a doughnut-shaped area that measures some 175 million miles wide and 50 million miles thick. The material in the belt travels at speeds up to 45,000 mph and ranges in size from dust particles to rock chunks as big as Alaska. Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to pass through the asteroid belt, considered a spectacular achievement, and then headed toward Jupiter. Accelerating to a speed of 82,000 mph, Pioneer 10 passed by Jupiter on December 3, 1973.

The spacecraft was the first to make direct observations and obtain close-up images of Jupiter. Pioneer also charted the gas giant’s intense radiation belts, located the planet’s magnetic field, and established Jupiter is predominantly a liquid planet. In 1983, Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass the orbit of Pluto, the most distant planet from the Sun.

Following its encounter with Jupiter, Pioneer 10 explored the outer regions of the solar system, studying energetic particles from the Sun (solar wind), and cosmic rays entering our portion of the Milky Way. The spacecraft continued to make valuable scientific investigations in the outer regions of the solar system until its science mission ended March 31, 1997.

Since that time, Pioneer 10’s weak signal has been tracked by the DSN as part of a new advanced-concept study of communication technology in support of NASA’s future Interstellar Probe mission. At last contact, Pioneer 10 was 7.6 billion miles from Earth, or 82 times the nominal distance between the Sun and the Earth. At that distance, it takes more than 11 hours and 20 minutes for the radio signal, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the Earth.

“From Ames Research Center and the Pioneer Project, we send our thanks to the many people at the Deep Space Network (DSN) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who made it possible to hear the spacecraft signal for this long,” said Pioneer 10 Flight Director David Lozier.

Pioneer 10 explored Jupiter, traveled twice as far as the most distant planet in our solar system, and as Earth’s first emissary into space, is carrying a gold plaque that describes what we look like, where we are, and the date when the mission began. Pioneer 10 will continue to coast silently as a ghost ship into interstellar space, heading generally for the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of the constellation Taurus (The Bull). Aldebaran is about 68 light-years away. It will take Pioneer 10 more than two million years to reach it. Its sister ship, Pioneer 11, ended its mission September 30, 1995, when the last transmission from the spacecraft was received. Information about Pioneer 10 is on the Internet at:

http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNhome.html