Patience

Written By: Matt Crabtree -

On January 4, 2024, I was about to leave on a trip to lead a group of seniors and college students to a conference called Passion in Atlanta. While I was excited for the conference, there was something else on my mind that was weighing heavy. An hour or so before we left, I met with the lead pastor of our Wallace family of campuses, Pastor John, to discuss that the Lord was calling my wife, Sarah Beth, and I to do ministry in South Knoxville and that we’d love for it to be part of Wallace family if he saw that it aligned with the vision of the church. He said he’d spend time praying about it, and we’d revisit it when we got back from the conference. 

We then get to Passion and they introduce a brand new song called The Lord Will Provide, and it became an instant anthem for this past season of Sarah Beth and mine’s life. God consistently used it to point to Matthew 6, where the song lyrics come from:

“25 “Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they? 27 Can any of you add one moment to his life span by worrying? 28 And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wildflowers of the field grow: They don’t labor or spin thread. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these. 30 If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t he do much more for you—you of little faith? 31 So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. 34 Therefore, don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” - Matthew 6:25-34 

We’ve definitely been in a season of waiting with the church since that day in January – waiting for Pastor John’s yes, for the church’s yes, for a new student pastor to take my spot, for a house in the south Knoxville area, for a building for us to meet in, but the Lord continuing to remind me and Sarah Beth to trust in His timing. Despite me not being the most patient person, and not being a fan of waiting, there’s been so much peace with us surrounding SoKno City and the waiting that’s taken place.

Both Sarah Beth and I believe that we were able to often have this peace and patience beyond our understanding because the Lord has used other areas of our lives to teach us to trust him in the process of waiting and not worrying. As much as we wanted SoKno City to become a thing for the past year, we’ve wanted some much for the past five years – a child. Through lots of tears and honest conversations with the Lord, I truly believe the Lord uses seasons like this to build up in us an endurance of faith and trust in Him 

Romans 5:3-5  3 And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, 4 endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. 5 This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

So, even though the past month or so has been a whirlwind with the church, and literally less than a month ago we didn’t officially even have a space yet, Sarah Beth and I weren’t really worried. Many around us were lovingly concerned about the space, but we weren’t  We knew that we could trust God to provide us this space to meet in in His good and perfect timing, because we have been trusting Him for a long time, on a deeper level in a process to provide us with something we were praying about and desiring even more.

God will use hard, unknown,seasons of waiting in your life to build up this endurance with the patience that we need to trust Him in the many other future seasons of your life when you’ll need to trust Him. For us, the wait for a church building might have been a little bit easier because while we were waiting for the building, we had finally received a bigger “Yes” that we had been waiting and praying for in God’s good perfect and timing, now we have a new little teammate joining us this fall and we are so excited.

We know there will be plenty of waiting and patience needed moving forward, while we’re very excited about our little blessing, the purpose of the waiting was never simply to receive the blessing. The purpose of the waiting was never for us to get to say “look at us we’re about to have a kid.” It always so we could stand here now and say, “Look what Christ did and His timing is perfect.”

The purpose of the waiting was to further develop endurance in our faith and to grow closer to Christ each day while we waited, so that we could point others to Him and say that you trust Him in the waiting.