How Do We Wait Well?
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I’ve had my fair share of waiting seasons. So much so that I sometimes find myself in a one-way conversation with God:
“Really, God? Why the delay? Why the uncertainty? Why are you making me wait AGAIN?
I say this conversation is one-sided because if I’m honest, I am not interested in God’s answers to these questions.
When it comes to waiting, I can lament with the best of them.
I much prefer control, certainty, efficiency, clarity and speed.
But our God is not a God of quickness – usually. He is far less concerned with speed than we are.
He also is much more interested in our surrender than He is in our personal desire for control.
In the last 10-15 years, I’ve experienced a lot of waiting. And sometimes I’ve been really patient and others I’ve been hog-tied by the weight of ‘When?’
I wouldn’t label myself as someone who waits well. Can you relate?
This past Christmas season, I was struck by the mention of how God was silent for the 400 years before Jesus was born – 4 centuries waiting on the Savior! I remember thinking to myself how miserable that must have been: to wait a lifetime…
That nudge and my own struggle with waiting, led me to dig into scripture and focus on the discipline of waiting and the intentional pursuit of patience.
These two verses from Isaiah resonated with me:
“You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you” – Isaiah 26:3
“So the Lord must wait for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion. For the Lord is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for his help.”- Isaiah 30:18
My Seasons of Waiting:
In spring of 2015, I got a call from my stepdad telling me that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
And we began to wait…wait and wonder when he would slip away. We were anxious about how this would unfold. And that quiet, but always-there thought: “Will this be the last (insert holiday/event/tradition)?” You’re trying to live in the moment but the waiting sometimes steals that away. I’ve been sitting in what is called anticipatory grief for 9 years.
In 2016, my husband and I began trying to conceive and that journey was nothing like I imagined it would be. It was a gut-wrenching season of waiting. One that brought out the best and worst in me. One that ultimately led to a tear-filled, ugly crying, car ride of surrender to God’s will. And more waiting… until one early morning in April 2018, the test finally said yes! And we had sweet Nora.
Then COVID in 2020 – we all waited. Goodness, what a season that was. Enough said.
We can each recall many other waiting seasons in our lives – it’s easy to recall, hard to do the actual waiting. By the end of this year, you’ll have another example of waiting that you don’t have today.
Waiting isn’t going away. Waiting is part of this human and earthly experience.
So if it’s not going away, how do we wait well?
Scripture tells us what we need to know.
First, patience is a fruit of the Spirit – we are encouraged by God to have patience and it is the Holy Spirt who inspires this growth within us. We meet the Holy Spirit in prayer – invite and welcome the Holy Spirit into your prayer rhythm. Seek this clarity from God “What am I supposed to learn in this season of waiting? Open my eyes to how you can be glorified through this. Guide my heart to see joy amongst the pain of waiting.” Consider these verses:
“We can rejoice too, when we run into problems or trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation.” – Romans 5:3-4
Second, waiting well requires a posture of trust in God. You’ve seen the memes ‘God is good, even if…’ and He is! Waiting well requires that we ask tough questions like:
“Do I trust God even if… I don’t get my way?”
“Do I trust God with my children?”
“Do I trust God with this diagnosis?”
“Do I trust God with this family problem?”
When I ask myself these questions, my answer isn’t always yes – but when it is, God’s peace falls upon me. Psalm 25:10 reassures us that,
The Lord leads with unfailing love and faithfulness all who keep his covenant and obey his demands.
That word covenant = commitment. It’s the No Matter What Zone. In addition, Psalm 62:1,5 encourages us to, “wait quietly before God, for my victory comes from him… let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him.”
Finally, I believe to wait well, we need self-control. In 2 Peter 1:5-6 we learn to “supplement your faith…with self control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness.”
While God gave us free will to make decisions throughout this life, there is no guarantee we get it right all the time. Many of these verses contain the word “endurance.” Endurance leads to self-control. The more we endure, the more we learn. And the more we learn, the more likely we are to pause before taking action or repeating mistakes of the past. I believe God wants us to deny ourselves the need to control situations and instead wants us to pause.
Pause and… you guessed it, seek Him. We need to push back against this worldly expectation to always be moving.
Moving is the opposite of waiting.
My hope for you is that you take the time to look back on your waiting seasons and search for how God was glorified in them. And that in current or future seasons of waiting, you will be inspired by how scripture guides us to wait well.
There are lessons in the waiting, friends.