Read Psalm 100:3

 We live today in a microwave culture. If it takes longer than five minutes to fix lunch, that's long! 

In earlier days, you even had to wait for a TV set to warm up. Can you imagine? And you couldn't push a single button on your phone to call home on a pre-set number, you had to dial it...with your finger, for pity's sake. Talk about the Stone Age!

I remember driving by a vacant lot some time ago, then going by the same corner several weeks later. Where there had been nothing but grass and weeds, empty beer cans, and trash just days before, there was now a huge warehouse, assembled from pre-fab sections, ready to receive goods.

That's the way life is today. Fast. Compressed. Condensed. Slam-bang-it's-done. 

Not so in God's wilderness schooling. When it comes to walking with God, there is no such thing as instant maturity. God doesn't mass-produce His saints. He hand-tools each one, and it always takes longer than we expected.

Excerpted from Charles R. Swindoll, Wisdom for the Way (Nashville: J. Countryman, a division of Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.