Magic Wand Thinking

This is the post that I was working on before getting stuck at the border:

Robert gets back from camp today. And to be fair, I’ve got to say enough with the “he’s not the world’s best nurse” stuff and tell you a story. Robert and I met in Honduras, but we lived a fourteen hour bus drive apart. After Robert and I got engaged on our first date, he went back to Catacamas, where he worked in a woodshop, learning how to make guitars, and teaching wood-turning to Honduran pastors so they could support themselves. We wrote letters to each other every day, sending them together in packets, and I still have them. In one he told me how he was getting a ride home late one night with his church friends, and on the side of the road, up ahead, they saw the fallout from a drunken machete fight. This was not uncommon in Catacamas, the wild, wild west of Honduras, where family feuds and weekend brawls left too many dead. Two men lay passed out on the road, one severely injured, his hand almost completely severed by a machete slash. At first, out of fear, the Hondurans did not want to stop, but Robert insisted, and of course, they agreed, and picked up the bleeding figure, and took him to the closest clinic. Which already had its hands full with two other slashed combatants from the same fight. So they drove on to another clinic. Which was low on supplies. Robert had to help the nurse put in the stitches (he liked this), and lent her his pocket knife to cut the thread.  He did not get home until the next day.

So no, my unempathetic husband does not sweat the small stuff. But when it counts, you’d want him there every time. I should know. But here is what I really like: He’s up at Camp mentoring people, while I am here recuperating from my fever and my trip to the ER, and I get this text: “Want to tell you about an idea that I talked about with Ed this morning. Magic wand thinking.”

Magic Wand Thinking. Robert and I have been talking a lot lately about how God loves processes. About how he takes time to teach us things, drawing from all kinds of people and happenings in our lives. About how he takes time to create things. Things like butterflies, grapes, canyons, teenagers, stars. Taking time does not seem to bother Him. In fact, He waited thousands of years to step into time personally. We should be expecting by now for Him to use long processes. I need to know this is true right now.

But what this text adds to the mix is what happens when we don’t give God time. When we insist on INSTANT along with the rest of our culture. What effects does this have, this magic wand thinking?  Well, for one thing, we might move into cultures or neighborhoods or lifestyles to fix them without listening first, without learning the language first. Or we might give someone a prayer to pray and walk away, without remembering discipleship is an eternal process, and who knows where it starts, and who know where it ends. Or we might insist on a miracle we desperately need but that God has not found fitting for His story. Or we might assume something about someone’s faith, someone, say, who doesn’t mind God taking his time to create a day, who is just happy it’s Him, creating. Or we might simply be impatient. (That’s me. My luck. I crash and burn on the Fruit of the Spirit stuff. Bet it’s on this semester’s syllabus.)  My guess is this: we are all, in some way, addicted to magic wands.

Robert is on his way home from Camp, and we are texting ideas. How could I not marry this one, this unempathetic Drunk-Rescuer? Do you know we are coming up on our 25^th? Yes, in August, when I’m probably having a mastectomy, or heart surgery, or radiation, or something. And this 25 year process—I’m good with it.