The Discipline of Delay

Me: What are you doing Prodigal?

Prodigal: I am waiting for my friend.

Me: I can make the time go by faster by sharing a story.

This comes from the book The Disciplines of Life by V. Raymond Edman. He shared about the life of the missionary Hudson Taylor.

Hudson Taylor knew the testing that tempers the steel of the soul. Invalided, home at twenty-nine after six years of intensive service in China, he settled with his little family in the east end of London. Outside interests lessened; friends began to forget; and five long hidden years were spent in the dreary street of a poor part of London, where the Taylors were “shut up to prayer and patience.” From the record of those years it has been written, “Yet, without those hidden years, with all their growth and testing, how could the vision and enthusiasm of youth have been matured for the leadership that was to be?” Faith, faithfulness, devotion, self-sacrifice, unremitting labor, patient, persevering prayer become their portion and power, but more, there is “the deep, prolonged exercise of a soul that is following hard after God…the gradual strengthening here, of a man called to walk by faith not by sight; the unutterable confidence of a heart cleaving to God and God alone, which pleases Him as nothing else can.” As the years of obscurity progressed, “prayer was the only way by which the burdened heart could obtain any relief”; and when the discipline was complete, there emerged the China Inland Mission, at first only a tiny root but destined of God to fill the land of China with gospel fruit.

Fear not; you will no longer live in shame.

Don’t be afraid; there is no more disgrace for you.

You will no longer remember the shame of your youth

and the sorrows of widowhood.

For your Creator will be your (mate);

The Lord of Heaven’s Armies is his name!

He is your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel,

the God of all the earth.

For the Lord has called you back from your grief-

as though you were a young wife abandoned by her husband, says your God.

Isaiah 54:4-6

Jennifer Van Allen