The Roof Vote the Building Committee Has Tabled for the Fourth Month in a Row
The Roof Vote the Building Committee Has Tabled for the Fourth Month in a Row
I have sat on the building committee at my church for six years, and Tuesday night was the fourth month running that the vote on replacing our sanctuary roof got moved to new business instead of old. We have three bids on the table, a leak over the baptistry that is getting worse every rain, and a chairman who keeps saying we need more information before we commit the church's money. I drove home gripping the steering wheel harder than the drive required, rehearsing the speech I did not give, the one where I finally say out loud that waiting any longer is its own kind of decision, and not a responsible one. I got home, sat in my driveway with the engine off, and realized I was angrier about four months of delay than I have any business being about a roof that has survived forty winters already.
I am twenty-six years sober, and impatience was one of the first things that ever got me drunk. I could not wait for a paycheck, could not wait for a woman to call back, could not wait for a feeling to pass without numbing it first. Sobriety did not erase that wiring. It just took away the one tool I used to use to quiet it. These days the impatience shows up over smaller things, a tabled vote, a slow line, a grown son who takes two days to return a text, but it is the same old current running underneath, the conviction that if I cannot see the ending yet, something has gone wrong and I am owed the right to force it.
Scripture is not shy about naming that exact impulse. James told a scattered, suffering church to look at a farmer for their model instead of a man in a hurry. "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" (James 5:7, NKJV). A farmer does not stand over his field shouting at the seed. He waits through a season he cannot speed up by wanting to. Habakkuk, watching his own nation's rescue stall out far longer than four months, was told the same hard, steady word. "For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. 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 sentence used to confuse me. Now I think I understand it. It tarries by my clock and arrives exactly on time by His.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once settled me down in that driveway. I can tell myself accurately that the roof will likely hold through one more winter, that careful committees make better decisions than rushed ones, that four months is nothing against forty years. Every sentence is true, and none of it has ever actually cooled the heat of wanting the thing decided now. Impatience was never really a facts problem waiting on a better argument for waiting. It is a trust problem, reaching for control over a timeline that was never mine to set in the first place.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that twenty-six years of knowing better could never finish producing by force of will. Paul does not list patience among the things a disciplined man eventually works up on his own. He lists it as fruit, something that grows out of a life attached to the Vine rather than something gritted out alone. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23, NKJV). Longsuffering is not a personality trait some men are lucky enough to be born with. It is supplied, the same way joy and peace are supplied, to a branch that stays where it is planted instead of straining ahead of the vine. David wrote the same promise with a tenderness I needed more than a lecture. "Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). Strengthen, not merely endure. And Jeremiah's scribe, grieving something far heavier than a roof vote, still landed on the same quiet confidence. "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). I have rarely waited quietly for anything in my life. I am only now learning what that even looks like.
I watch a restless world right now, treaties announced and then stalled, nations demanding instant resolutions to centuries-old wounds, and I do not think it is an accident that so many of us have lost the capacity to wait well. Scoffers have always asked some version of where the promise is, and Peter answered them with a patience bigger than ours. "The LORD is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9, NKJV). He is not stalling. He is giving room for more of us to come home before the ending arrives. Paul tells the Galatians what our part looks like while we wait on things smaller than the end of the world. "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart" (Galatians 6:9, NKJV).
Our committee meets again next month. I plan to show up and make my case calmly instead of forcing a vote out of impatience dressed up as responsibility, and I plan to let the timeline belong to God whether that means next month or next winter. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which vote, which line, which slow and ordinary delay has you gripping a steering wheel in your own driveway. He has a plan for you that was never running behind schedule, and a peace that was never contingent on you forcing the ending to arrive sooner. He will never leave you waiting alone, and He is coming back on a day no committee will ever table, right on time, exactly as He promised.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): James 5:7; Habakkuk 2:3; Galatians 5:22-23; Psalm 27:14; Lamentations 3:25-26; 2 Peter 3:9; Galatians 6:9.
I have sat on the building committee at my church for six years, and Tuesday night was the fourth month running that the vote on replacing our sanctuary roof got moved to new business instead of old. We have three bids on the table, a leak over the baptistry that is getting worse every rain, and a chairman who keeps saying we need more information before we commit the church's money. I drove home gripping the steering wheel harder than the drive required, rehearsing the speech I did not give, the one where I finally say out loud that waiting any longer is its own kind of decision, and not a responsible one. I got home, sat in my driveway with the engine off, and realized I was angrier about four months of delay than I have any business being about a roof that has survived forty winters already.
I am twenty-six years sober, and impatience was one of the first things that ever got me drunk. I could not wait for a paycheck, could not wait for a woman to call back, could not wait for a feeling to pass without numbing it first. Sobriety did not erase that wiring. It just took away the one tool I used to use to quiet it. These days the impatience shows up over smaller things, a tabled vote, a slow line, a grown son who takes two days to return a text, but it is the same old current running underneath, the conviction that if I cannot see the ending yet, something has gone wrong and I am owed the right to force it.
Scripture is not shy about naming that exact impulse. James told a scattered, suffering church to look at a farmer for their model instead of a man in a hurry. "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" (James 5:7, NKJV). A farmer does not stand over his field shouting at the seed. He waits through a season he cannot speed up by wanting to. Habakkuk, watching his own nation's rescue stall out far longer than four months, was told the same hard, steady word. "For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. 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 sentence used to confuse me. Now I think I understand it. It tarries by my clock and arrives exactly on time by His.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once settled me down in that driveway. I can tell myself accurately that the roof will likely hold through one more winter, that careful committees make better decisions than rushed ones, that four months is nothing against forty years. Every sentence is true, and none of it has ever actually cooled the heat of wanting the thing decided now. Impatience was never really a facts problem waiting on a better argument for waiting. It is a trust problem, reaching for control over a timeline that was never mine to set in the first place.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that twenty-six years of knowing better could never finish producing by force of will. Paul does not list patience among the things a disciplined man eventually works up on his own. He lists it as fruit, something that grows out of a life attached to the Vine rather than something gritted out alone. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23, NKJV). Longsuffering is not a personality trait some men are lucky enough to be born with. It is supplied, the same way joy and peace are supplied, to a branch that stays where it is planted instead of straining ahead of the vine. David wrote the same promise with a tenderness I needed more than a lecture. "Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). Strengthen, not merely endure. And Jeremiah's scribe, grieving something far heavier than a roof vote, still landed on the same quiet confidence. "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). I have rarely waited quietly for anything in my life. I am only now learning what that even looks like.
I watch a restless world right now, treaties announced and then stalled, nations demanding instant resolutions to centuries-old wounds, and I do not think it is an accident that so many of us have lost the capacity to wait well. Scoffers have always asked some version of where the promise is, and Peter answered them with a patience bigger than ours. "The LORD is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9, NKJV). He is not stalling. He is giving room for more of us to come home before the ending arrives. Paul tells the Galatians what our part looks like while we wait on things smaller than the end of the world. "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart" (Galatians 6:9, NKJV).
Our committee meets again next month. I plan to show up and make my case calmly instead of forcing a vote out of impatience dressed up as responsibility, and I plan to let the timeline belong to God whether that means next month or next winter. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which vote, which line, which slow and ordinary delay has you gripping a steering wheel in your own driveway. He has a plan for you that was never running behind schedule, and a peace that was never contingent on you forcing the ending to arrive sooner. He will never leave you waiting alone, and He is coming back on a day no committee will ever table, right on time, exactly as He promised.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): James 5:7; Habakkuk 2:3; Galatians 5:22-23; Psalm 27:14; Lamentations 3:25-26; 2 Peter 3:9; Galatians 6:9.
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