The Wait

By: Ingrid Jocholá

Who likes to wait? Waiting is the worst. We want everything to be instantaneous.  We often pray for years for people to know the Lord, but in the end we give them up as lost causes because we believe that the response has dragged on longer than we can wait. We must remember that it will occur not in our own timing, but in God’s timing.

Hernán Lindo is an elderly gentleman, blind for the past three years due to glaucoma. We invited him to a medical clinic in the community of Los Libertadores, Panama. Since we knew of his condition, we offered to bring him from his fifth-floor apartment to the basketball court where we were holding the clinic. However, we were so busy on the day of the clinic keeping up with everything, it was difficult to find a time to go help him.  At the end of the clinic, we were able to bring the doctor and the medications up to his apartment. The doctor completed the exam and we prayed for him. We asked if we could come visit another day, and he said we could.

As time passed and we got to know him more, he told us he rarely answered the door when people knocked. It was even rarer that he would accept a visit from people like my friend Marleidy and me. We prayed and read to him from the Bible. It was a very special time, because he told us he had never read the Bible in his life, but now he was hearing it from us. We all learned from our time together. He liked to argue and throw out different points of view in order to understand.

Now he trusts and loves the Lord. One time he told us that if he had his sight, he probably wouldn’t have met us the day we came to his door. He used to use his home only to sleep before he went blind. He knew that without a doubt God used this way for us to meet. Thanks to help from Dhariana de Murillo, the Nazarene Compassionate Ministries Coordinator, we were able to acquire a device for him to listen to the Bible. She showed him how to use it, and now he listens to Scripture even after we, as his friends from Guatemala and Mexico, have ended our time in Panama.

Without a doubt the prayers of Hernán Lindo’s son were answered. He had been praying that his father would find the Lord. He waited a long time for God’s response, and now that Hernán’s life has been transformed, he feels it is an answer to all of the prayers he prayed.

“Lord, I wait for you. You will answer, Lord my God.” Psalm 38:15 NIV