…they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. (Isaiah 40:31, ESV)
Days before Phil Mickelson’s Sunday win in Mexico City, his erstwhile caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay was talking the Masters. Not whether Mickelson (or Woods, or anyone else) could win this year, which has already become a tiresome conversation a month before the men move to Augusta. Instead, Mackay’s insights had to do with how Mickelson has won the Masters three times.
We can set our life’s sails in a certain direction and wait for the wind that will take us there.Nearly every golf fan knows the hopes that have dashed through the years at the twelfth, with water fronting the frightfully shallow green and bunkers, bushes, and pine straw behind. You don’t have to rewind the time machine very far to relive Jordan Spieth’s 2016 catastrophe there. It cost him a second consecutive green jacket.
What Mackay revealed in a conference call on Golf Channel was that he and Phil would take extra time at the twelfth. Not to choose the club. Rather, to “wait on your wind.”
There is much guessing to be done at the twelfth if you go that way. What does the flag at the eleventh tell you? What do the trees over near thirteen suggest? How hard is it blowing exactly? With all these confusing questions going through his head, a player—and his caddie—could back off and go to the bag two and three and four times.
This is not the Mickelson way. Here’s how Mackay described it: “So what we would do is just pick a club for a certain wind and wait for that wind to show up.”
With that in mind, consider the expression of Solomon in Ecclesiastes when he observed several times over that the ways of the world are like “chasing the wind.” It was his way of stating that so much of our business (and busyness) is useless.
Here we may step back and recognize that we have two options. We can feel the wind in one moment and try to catch its breezes, only to have to start again a few heartbeats later. Or we can set our life’s sails in a certain direction and wait for the wind that will take us there.
Maybe this is the best work we can do in coming to an understanding of what it means to wait on the Lord. It is not that we have to run and find him, first here and then there. Instead it is that we set our feet in his camp, firm in our faith, and wait for him to come—he will!—and move us according to his plan.
In the waiting, our strength is renewed. We are made ready to go from standing firm to running and not growing weary, to walking and not fainting. Yes, when God is with us, we can swing away!
—
Jeff Hopper
March 7, 2018
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.