Instant Mashed Potatoes

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unday afternoons were always a wonderful time at our house.  After church we would rush home, change clothes, and assemble in the kitchen for Sunday dinner.  Since I grew up in the southern part of the United States, dinner was always the twelve o’clock meal while the evening meal was, and still is, referred to as supper.  Some Sundays, instead of going home for dinner, we would go to grandma and grandpa’s and eat with them.  Our whole family would go and I enjoyed the food, the conversation, and the laughter. 

I always loved going to grandma’s house for Sunday dinner.  Usually, she would have steak and gravy, green beans, corn, fresh biscuits, sliced tomatoes, sliced onions, and mashed potatoes.  No matter what else she served, there was always a bowl of mashed potatoes on her menu.  My brother loved grandma’s potatoes and would usually eat more than his share.  Every time we would go, he would expect her to have mashed potatoes and he was never disappointed.

Grandma had a secret recipe for her mashed potatoes; they were an instant brand.  Instead of having to wrestle with cooking the potatoes, peeling them, and mashing them, all she had to do was boil water and add the potato flakes.  In a few short moments, we had mashed potatoes and if we ran out, it took only a few moments to replenish the supply.  My brother often referred to her as instant grandma!  He thought it was neat the way she could just whip up potatoes on demand, even if we dropped in unexpectedly.

I have often thought about those potatoes and the wonderful times we had as a family around the dinner table.  Of all the wonderful things to eat, the potatoes stand out in my mind as I write this Tidbit.  They represent the fashion in which most of us live our lives today.  We have grown accustomed to instant gratification in our society.  We want to eat, so, instead of preparing a meal, we order out or get fast food. We get impatient with our computers or with the fax machine if they take more than one minute to download our information and when we ask a question we expect an immediate response.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we live our spiritual lives with the same expectations.  We have a Polaroid mentality when it comes to our Heavenly Father.  We put in a request and, in sixty seconds, we expect to have a fully developed plan of action with nothing negative thrown in.  Our prayer life resembles very closely the process of making instant mashed potatoes.  We pray real hard for a few minutes, bringing the spiritual water to the boiling point, and then we expect God to throw in a pre-measured answer, ready for consumption in five minutes.

However, the Scriptures don’t reveal this to be the normal way that God’s people relate to Him.  Yes, God does answer prayer instantaneously, but God is far more interested in relating to us, in talking to us, in communicating with us, than He is with just handing us a quick answer.  The prophet Habakkuk, had learned this lesson.  After praying to God, asking Him some very straightforward and difficult questions, Habakkuk waited on God’s answer.  Look at his words as recorded in Habakkuk, 2:1: “I will climb up into my watchtower now and wait to see what the Lord will say to me and how he will answer my complaint.”

After praying to God, Habakkuk didn’t expect overnight delivery of God’s answer to his prayer.  Instead, after praying, after doing all he could do, after making his request known, Habakkuk climbed up into the watchtower to wait for an answer.  It is very interesting that he went to the tower.  The watchtower was the place for standing guard, for being on the lookout for an attack or for a messenger delivering a dispatch.  Habakkuk’s visit to the watchtower was an indication of his faith that God would answer his request.  He went to the tower to watch!

So often, we bring our requests to God and expect Him to open heaven and parachute an answer right to us.  We need to understand that the purpose of prayer is not to constantly bring our wish lists to God and tell Him what we want.  Instead, it is the means by which we talk to Him and He talks to us.  It is in prayer that we can tell God what’s on our minds and our hearts.  It is in prayer that He can communicate His word to us and teach us the things we need to know in order to deepen our relationship with Him.  In the watchtower, there is time to think, to reflect, to read God’s word, to be still and to know that He is God.  So, are you in the watchtower today or are you in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil?