The Elevator Button I Keep Pressing Anyway
The Elevator Button I Keep Pressing Anyway
RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 23, 2026
I know the button does not work faster the third time I press it. I have watched the little light behind it flicker on with the very first touch, and I still stab it two more times every morning while I stand in the lobby of my office building, as if my thumb could argue the machine into moving quicker than the cables allow. It is such a small thing that I never thought to name it until my daughter, six years old and riding up with me one morning, asked why I kept doing that when the light was already on. I did not have a good answer for her. I still do not, except that some old habit in me has never learned to just stand still and let something take the time it takes.
That habit did not start with elevators. It started years ago, in the stretch of my life I do not talk about at dinner parties, when waiting for anything felt like a kind of suffocation. I learned to treat every gap of unfilled time as an emergency, something to be solved immediately rather than endured. Sobriety did not erase that reflex. It just moved it from bottles to elevator buttons, to refreshing my email every ninety seconds while I wait to hear back about a job. I am, if I am honest, still that same man some mornings, just aimed at smaller and more socially acceptable targets.
What I am slowly learning is that impatience is not really about the elevator or the email at all. It is about trust, or the lack of it. Every extra press of that button is a small vote of no confidence that the mechanism already in motion will arrive without my help. If I am willing to say that about a piece of machinery, I have to be willing to say it about God too, because I have spent far more energy trying to hurry Him along than trusting His timing.
David wrote something to a nation that had every reason to feel like waiting on God was a losing strategy, surrounded on every side, and he did not soften it into a suggestion. "Wait on the LORD; Be of good courage, And He shall strengthen your heart; Wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). He says it twice in one breath, which tells me he knew exactly how many times a worried heart needs to hear it before it starts to sink in. Waiting is not the empty space between the real parts of the story. According to David, it is where courage and strength actually get built into you, in a way that arriving early never could.
Jeremiah, writing from the middle of a genuine catastrophe, said something I have had to sit with. "The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly For the salvation of the LORD" (Lamentations 3:25-26, NKJV). Quietly. That word convicts me every time, because my waiting has almost never been quiet. It has been jaw clenched, foot tapping, thumb jabbing at a button that already lit up. He describes a soul that has stopped treating the wait as the enemy and started treating it as the very place goodness is being worked out.
James gives me a picture I cannot argue my way around. "Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand" (James 5:7-8, NKJV). No farmer stands in his field yelling at the soil to hurry. He cannot make rain fall by wanting it badly enough, and neither can I make an answer arrive by refreshing my inbox again. The waiting is not wasted time while the real work happens elsewhere. For the farmer, the waiting is the work, done with hands open instead of clenched.
Habakkuk asked God an honest, frustrated question and got an answer that still applies to every gap between the prayer and the answer. "Though it tarries, wait for it; Because it will surely come, It will not tarry" (Habakkuk 2:3, NKJV). Tarry and not tarry in the same verse sounds like a contradiction until you realize it is not describing God's timing as slow. It is describing my perception of it as impatient, while His arrival was never actually late.
None of this is a technique I can master by trying harder, because trying harder is exactly the muscle that got me into this in the first place. "And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful" (Colossians 3:15, NKJV). Ruling is not something I generate. It is something I let in, a peace from the Holy Spirit abiding in me, settling what my own reasoning never could, because reasoning was never built to make peace, only arguments for why I deserve the answer now.
I still press that button more than once some mornings. But lately I have caught myself, right in the middle of the second press, and just stopped, and let the doors open whenever they were always going to open. God is alive today, He already knows exactly what you are waiting on, He has a plan moving toward you even in this exact silence, and He will never leave you standing in that lobby alone.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Psalm 27:14; Lamentations 3:25-26; James 5:7-8; Habakkuk 2:3; Colossians 3:15.
RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 23, 2026
I know the button does not work faster the third time I press it. I have watched the little light behind it flicker on with the very first touch, and I still stab it two more times every morning while I stand in the lobby of my office building, as if my thumb could argue the machine into moving quicker than the cables allow. It is such a small thing that I never thought to name it until my daughter, six years old and riding up with me one morning, asked why I kept doing that when the light was already on. I did not have a good answer for her. I still do not, except that some old habit in me has never learned to just stand still and let something take the time it takes.
That habit did not start with elevators. It started years ago, in the stretch of my life I do not talk about at dinner parties, when waiting for anything felt like a kind of suffocation. I learned to treat every gap of unfilled time as an emergency, something to be solved immediately rather than endured. Sobriety did not erase that reflex. It just moved it from bottles to elevator buttons, to refreshing my email every ninety seconds while I wait to hear back about a job. I am, if I am honest, still that same man some mornings, just aimed at smaller and more socially acceptable targets.
What I am slowly learning is that impatience is not really about the elevator or the email at all. It is about trust, or the lack of it. Every extra press of that button is a small vote of no confidence that the mechanism already in motion will arrive without my help. If I am willing to say that about a piece of machinery, I have to be willing to say it about God too, because I have spent far more energy trying to hurry Him along than trusting His timing.
David wrote something to a nation that had every reason to feel like waiting on God was a losing strategy, surrounded on every side, and he did not soften it into a suggestion. "Wait on the LORD; Be of good courage, And He shall strengthen your heart; Wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). He says it twice in one breath, which tells me he knew exactly how many times a worried heart needs to hear it before it starts to sink in. Waiting is not the empty space between the real parts of the story. According to David, it is where courage and strength actually get built into you, in a way that arriving early never could.
Jeremiah, writing from the middle of a genuine catastrophe, said something I have had to sit with. "The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly For the salvation of the LORD" (Lamentations 3:25-26, NKJV). Quietly. That word convicts me every time, because my waiting has almost never been quiet. It has been jaw clenched, foot tapping, thumb jabbing at a button that already lit up. He describes a soul that has stopped treating the wait as the enemy and started treating it as the very place goodness is being worked out.
James gives me a picture I cannot argue my way around. "Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand" (James 5:7-8, NKJV). No farmer stands in his field yelling at the soil to hurry. He cannot make rain fall by wanting it badly enough, and neither can I make an answer arrive by refreshing my inbox again. The waiting is not wasted time while the real work happens elsewhere. For the farmer, the waiting is the work, done with hands open instead of clenched.
Habakkuk asked God an honest, frustrated question and got an answer that still applies to every gap between the prayer and the answer. "Though it tarries, wait for it; Because it will surely come, It will not tarry" (Habakkuk 2:3, NKJV). Tarry and not tarry in the same verse sounds like a contradiction until you realize it is not describing God's timing as slow. It is describing my perception of it as impatient, while His arrival was never actually late.
None of this is a technique I can master by trying harder, because trying harder is exactly the muscle that got me into this in the first place. "And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful" (Colossians 3:15, NKJV). Ruling is not something I generate. It is something I let in, a peace from the Holy Spirit abiding in me, settling what my own reasoning never could, because reasoning was never built to make peace, only arguments for why I deserve the answer now.
I still press that button more than once some mornings. But lately I have caught myself, right in the middle of the second press, and just stopped, and let the doors open whenever they were always going to open. God is alive today, He already knows exactly what you are waiting on, He has a plan moving toward you even in this exact silence, and He will never leave you standing in that lobby alone.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Psalm 27:14; Lamentations 3:25-26; James 5:7-8; Habakkuk 2:3; Colossians 3:15.
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