This self-sufficient age in which we live operates on the premise that we can always take charge of our lives. We are taught to believe that no matter what confronts us, with enough energy and courage, we can forge ahead and brush aside all obstacles and obstructions that impede our path.

This take-charge attitude is imparted to us as wisdom. It is instilled in us early on. It is the premise upon which we are taught to succeed. This notion that we can always take charge of our lives is the reason, I believe, so many love to quote William Ernest Henley’s Invictus, which says:

This sounds good, but the common understanding of it is not true, for it flies in the face of the providence of God. Too often, those who recite these lines glean from them some sense that they alone are responsible for the outcome of their lives. The psalmist in the long ago had a better sense of our destinies when he said, "Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture" (Ps. 100:3).

I suppose it is possible to think that we can always take charge of our lives, especially when we are young and healthy, or reasonably prosperous, or when we are completely in charge of our mental faculties. It is possible to believe life will always respond to our strong-willed wishes and desires, especially when rank and privilege are our constant companions and the bright morning of opportunity shines so radiantly upon our paths. Under such circumstances, one could conclude that this take-charge approach works in any and all situations.

But the truth of the matter is that different seasons come to all our lives. There are seasons when all that we touch turns to gold. There are seasons when the next step in our lives is so clear and so close we would seem foolish not to take it. There are those moments in life when God is in God’s heaven and all is right with the world. But such times do not last forever. In truth, seasons of loss, helplessness, and waiting come to all our lives.

One of life’s most difficult lessons is learning how to wait on God through a dry and difficult season; a season where we are forced to wait, in spite of our nerves of steel and steadfast prayers, in spite of the American mind set that tells us we can always take charge. We find ourselves unable to effect the kind of outcome we would like to see. It is for this reason—our difficulty in learning how to wait—that our text is taken from this strange, hard-to-find-book called Habakkuk. This so-called minor prophet has a major word to say to us about how to wait on God.

In Habakkuk, we find a word of encouragement for those who have grown impatient waiting on the promises of God. We find a word of hope for those who, even now, are struggling to make sense of dashed hopes, shattered dreams, and uncertain futures. There is a word for people who, because of life’s uneven journey, find themselves ailing and, therefore, in need of a prescription for hard times. Habakkuk is just what the doctor ordered.

What is going on in the world of this seventh-century prophet that ushers in his own season of waiting? Habakkuk complains to God about the rampant injustice in Judean society. He asks God how long he would allow the oppression of the weak by the strong among God’s own people, and he wonders how long it will be before God brings judgement upon God’s own wayward people. But Habakkuk does not like God’s answer, for God tells him he will use a heathen king and a heathen army—Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians—to discipline his own people. This answer confuses Habakkuk. He knows that the Babylonians are no paragons of virtue, and he just cannot believe that a pure and holy God would stand idly by and watch them swallow up his people.

Old Testament scholar J. J. M. Roberts says it is at this point that Habakkuk, unwilling to accept God’s answer, talks back to God – as did other great people of faith in the Old Testament. Difficult seasons will make you talk back to God, not out of irreverence, but out of a sense of confusion and perplexity about the purposes of God in your life. It is easy to wait on God as long as we can make some sense of what God is doing; as long as there is some discernible design to the movement of God in our lives. But when God shocks us and surprises us and refuses to answer our prayers as we said them, when we said them, and how we said them, then it becomes difficult to wait and hard not to talk back.

What do you do when you are no longer sure how God is going to work out God’s purpose in your life? What do you do when you are not even sure that God is at work in your life? You are unhappy where you are and yet unsure about where God is leading. What do you do when you find yourself in a difficult season of waiting where heaven is silent or the trumpet is sounding forth an uncertain sound? Our natural instinct, especially those of us who have bought into the take-charge attitude, is to make something happen; to try to make our season of waiting come to an end. It is here that T.S. Eliot’s advice in Ash Wednesday is so appropriate: "Teach us to sit still." There are seasons in all our lives when we shall have no choice but to wait.

Though we have no choice but to wait, we do have a choice as to how we shall wait. Some people wait out a difficult season in a spirit of rebellion. They go through life angry and disheartened, and they make their displeasure known to any and all who will listen. Some wait out a difficult season in a spirit of resignation. Life for them loses all purpose and perspective, so they become cynical about life, and they trudge forward with a dull and listless spirit. Of God’s guiding hand and tender mercies they sarcastically proclaim, " What will be, will be."

There is, however, a third way to wait on God through our own dry and difficult seasons, and it is the wait of anticipation. Habakkuk suggests that this is the way the righteous wait. Their wait is alert and charged with expectation. Their stand is one of tip-toe anticipation. They wait in the fervent hope of a brighter tomorrow morning when night with all its shadows will be passed away. Habakkuk, confused about the purposes of God in his life and the lives of his people, waits through a difficult season for an answer from God. Finally, God speaks to him of a vision whose fulfillment awaits its appointed time. An appointed time indicates a set time in the future that can neither be rushed nor delayed. And appointed time means God has a fixed and ordered time to move decisively in our lives. Its arrival and duration are ordered by God and not by us.

In the text before us, God does not even tell Habakkuk the contents of the vision. God simply assures him that it is a trustworthy vision that at the end shall speak and not lie. It is a vision in which Habakkuk can find security, for the one who reveals it is able to back up what it promises. When you wait on that which God has promised, it is not a lie on which you have fixed your heart. It is not a vain hope that will bear no fruit. It is a promise that will surely come. The one who makes this promise is none other than God: the Alpha and the Omega; the one who stands above the flux and flow of human history; the God who promises and cannot lie; the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore. This God says it will surely come.

This the word of hope I leave with you today. Dry and difficult seasons when we are forced to wait do not last forever. In their own way, they too are a part of the purposes of God. But when your season of waiting is over, what has been dry and desolate in your life shall blossom as a rose, and what has been so bitter to your soul shall be made sweet. Then, you, too, can join in singing that old African-American spiritual:

Cleophus LaRue: I think you are right. I think a people who have known oppression had to come to some understanding about how to go on with life in spite of all that befalls them and yet keep a vibrant hope in life. This notion of waiting on a powerful, sovereign God who will come, who has come, gives black people hope. And, yes, that is born of my own experience, also.

Talbot: You grew up in the church in Corpus Christi, Texas. You are a child of the church.

LaRue: Yes.

Talbot: You told me earlier before the program that you admired the black preachers because of the dignity that you saw.

LaRue: Absolutely. Dignity and respect. They were community leaders. They were held in high esteem by the black and white and Hispanic communities. They carried themselves in such a way that the younger blacks looked up to them and admired them. So from my youth up, I have always admired black preachers and I continue to do so.

Talbot: And so this response in the scriptural reference from Habakkuk of anticipation, not rebellion, not resignation or sarcasm, but anticipation. That has to be based in hope.

LaRue: Absolutely. It is hope born of experience because when you preach about hope and a brighter tomorrow, it is not something that blacks are not acquainted with. We have known this, we have seen this. So in a sense I am simply reaffirming for them what they already know and believe. If I were actually in front of black audience, they would be saying, "Yes! Amen! We know about what you are saying." We have lived it and experienced this anticipation.

Talbot: Martin Luther King said, "How long?" How long. The power of those words and the struggle.

LaRue: From time to time a burden is lifted and some positive things come through. It gives those who have been oppressed some sense that other things will also get better. You mentioned Martin Luther King. If you look at the time in which he lived, we have come a long way and it has been on the basis of this hope, anticipation, and struggle. And it has been born out in our lives, so this anticipation continues to be.

Talbot: You site the self-sufficient culture in which we live. That’s a problem, isn’t it, in understanding how to manage the waiting that you talk about. You quoted the poem, Invictus. It’s interesting that Timothy McVey choose those words at his death: master of my fate,...captain of my soul. It’s troubling.

LaRue: Until the last, he had the sense that he was in charge and he was in control. That was most unfortunate because he said it as he prepared for death which is clear to the case that he was not in control. There is a sense in which the whole American mind set is built around this notion that we can always take charge of our lives. The events of September 11^th and all have shown us that we are not always in charge and that there are times when we have no choice but wait, to wait on this higher power.

Talbot: So God is ultimately in charge and it is God’s work that we need to be about.

LaRue: Absolutely. And it is God at work in our lives to effect God’s purpose that brings us to our purposeful end. It is not simply that we are at work and we bring our lives. It is God at work in us who brings us to our purposeful end. That’s why we have to wait on God, so that life makes sense and is meaningful.

Talbot: The distinction there between self interest—focusing on ourselves or our families—and the kind of hope that you are talking about where it is up to God.

LaRue: That’s right. It is a hope born of: Why have I been put upon this earth? What is my reason for being here? How best do I carry out the plan for which I have been placed here? It is in a reliance on God. We have a work but it is God’s guiding hand that directs us in how to make that work most meaningful.

Talbot: You are a distinguished expert at Princeton on the history of black preaching; the styles and patterns of black preaching. Tell us about your new book, The Heart of Black Preaching.

LaRue: The Heart of Black Preaching is an effort to go back into three hundred years of black preaching history to see if we could discover some thread that ran throughout the whole of our preaching in this country. What I was able to discover is that there is in black preaching a common thread that centers around a sovereign God. Throughout history, in every period of our lives upon these shores, we have always believed that a sovereign, all powerful God was at work on our behalf. Had we not believed that I don’t know if we could have come through the dark night of slavery or the oppression of segregation and many other things that we have been able to come through.