Learning to Wait

I’ve spent a good part of my life believing that if something wasn’t moving, I probably needed to do something about it. That’s served me pretty well in some areas of life. If there’s a problem at work, I want to figure out what’s causing it and fix it. If something isn’t working at home, my mind naturally starts looking for a solution. Even when someone comes to me with something they’re struggling with, I have to fight the urge to start solving the problem before they’ve finished telling me about it. I like movement. I like knowing we’re making progress, even if it’s slow.

That way of thinking gets a little more complicated when you’re walking with God.

There have been seasons when I’ve prayed about something and felt like I had a pretty clear sense of where God was leading, only to watch absolutely nothing happen. I pray for doors to open that stayed closed. I’ve asked God for direction and received what felt like silence. There have been circumstances I desperately wanted Him to change, and instead of changing them, He seemed content to leave me sitting right in the middle of them. Those have been some of the hardest seasons of my life, not necessarily because something terrible was happening, but because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

Waiting has never come naturally to me. Even the word feels passive, and I don’t like feeling passive. I feel useless. Give me something to work on, to build, or to fix, and I’m usually pretty comfortable. Tell me there is nothing I can do right now except trust God and wait, and suddenly I become aware of just how much security I get from being able to do something.

I don’t think I understood that about myself for a long time. I would have told you I trusted God, and I did. But I also trusted my ability to figure things out. I trusted my work ethic and the instincts that came along with it. They are not bad things, and God has used them in my life more times than I can count. The problem came when I couldn’t tell where faithfulness ended and my need for control began. Waiting has a way of exposing that line.

When you have done what you know to do, and nothing changes, you start finding out what is underneath all of your activity. At least I have. I have discovered fears I didn’t know were there. I learned of childhood wounds I never knew existed. And most importantly, realized how uncomfortable uncertainty makes me. I catch myself wanting God to explain Himself, as though knowing what He was doing would somehow make trusting Him easier. There have even been times when I’ve started questioning things I once felt certain about simply because they weren’t happening according to the timeline I had expected.

I think that’s one of the hardest parts of waiting. Given enough time, you start second-guessing yourself. You start thinking things like, “Maybe I heard God wrong,” “Maybe I made the wrong decision,” or “Maybe I should do something different.” In some cases, those are healthy questions, and we need to ask them. I have made enough mistakes in my life to know that not every idea I have has come from God. But I have also learned that sometimes that questioning has less to do with discernment and more to do with my discomfort that God isn’t moving fast enough for me.

I often pray, “Lord, just show me what You’re doing.” It sounds like a prayer for wisdom, but I know there have been times when what I really meant was, “Explain this to me so I can feel better about it.” I wanted to see enough of the plan to know everything was going to turn out the way I hoped. I wasn’t asking for the next step as much as I was asking God to remove the uncertainty. That has probably taught me more about trust than getting the answer ever could.

I have been pondering Abraham’s story lately. God made him a promise that seemed impossible from the beginning. He would have a son, and through that son would come descendants too numerous to count. Abraham believed God, but then the years started passing, and nothing happened. The promise didn’t change, but his circumstances certainly weren’t making it look any more likely. Eventually Abraham and Sarah did something I understand more now than I used to. They tried to help.

For years, I read that part of the story and wondered how Abraham could have done that after everything God had told him. The older I get, the less judgmental I am about it. I know what it feels like to believe God has said something and then watch enough time pass that you begin wondering whether you need to help move things along. Waiting can make a bad idea look surprisingly reasonable, especially when the idea gives us back some sense of control.

I’ve done my own versions of that. Maybe not with anything as dramatic as Abraham and Sarah, but I’ve forced conversations because I wanted resolution. Tried to move something forward before it was ready because standing still made me uncomfortable. Even spent hours thinking through every possible outcome, convincing myself that if I could understand the situation well enough, I could somehow control what happened next, calling it wisdom. Looking back, a lot of it was fear.

The difficult thing about Abraham’s story is that God wasn’t late. Abraham simply didn’t know how long the promise would take. That’s the part I do not like.

I would much rather have God give me the promise and the calendar at the same time. If I knew something was going to take five years, at least I could prepare myself for five years. If I knew the difficult season would end next March, I could probably endure it differently. There’s something about not knowing that gets underneath us. We aren’t just waiting for an answer; we’re living without knowing when the answer is coming or, sometimes, what the answer will even be.

That’s where I’ve had to wrestle with what I actually mean when I say I trust God. Do I trust Him because I believe He will eventually give me the outcome I want, or do I trust Him because I’ve come to believe He is good even when I don’t know what He’s doing? I wish I could say I’ve always lived from the second one. But I haven’t.

If I am being honest, many times my trust in God was quietly attached to an outcome. I was willing to wait as long as I believed the waiting eventually led where I wanted to go. When the possibility entered my mind that God might answer differently, waiting became much harder. It forced me to confront whether I wanted God’s will or whether I wanted God to bless mine. That’s not an easy thing to admit.

I think that’s part of what God has been doing in me during the seasons when He hasn’t answered as quickly as I wanted. For a long time, I assumed the waiting room was just the place you sat until God finally opened the door. I’m beginning to see that He does some of His deepest work there. Not because waiting itself is somehow spiritual, but because there are things in me that only seem to come to the surface when I can no longer make progress happen on my own.

Waiting has exposed how much I want control. It has shown me how quickly fear starts writing stories when I don’t know what comes next. It has revealed how much peace I sometimes draw from circumstances going the way I expected. I don’t think God created those things in me by making me wait. I think waiting simply made them difficult to hide.

David’s story has started looking different to me for the same reason. Samuel anointed him to be king when he was still young, but David didn’t walk out of that moment and take the throne. He went back to a life that probably looked remarkably similar to the one he had before Samuel arrived. Eventually he served Saul, fought battles, became celebrated, was hunted, lived in caves, and spent years carrying a promise that hadn’t happened yet. I wonder what those years did inside him.

We know how the story ends, which makes it easy to rush through the middle. David didn’t know the ending while he was living it. He couldn’t turn ahead a few chapters and see when Saul would be gone or when he would finally become king. He had to wake up each morning and live whatever day God had given him while carrying a promise that still seemed somewhere in the distance.

I think that’s the part of these stories I’ve missed for most of my life. I read them knowing the ending. Abraham gets Isaac. Joseph eventually leaves prison and saves his family. David does become king. Israel reaches the Promised Land. Knowing how everything turns out makes the waiting feel much shorter than it actually was. Our own lives don’t work that way.

We’re living in the middle of the chapter.

We don’t know which prayer will be answered the way we’ve hoped. We have no clue which door will eventually open, how long a difficult season will last, or whether the thing we’re asking God to restore will ever look the way it once did. We know the character of God, but we don’t know the details of the story He’s writing. That has been difficult for me, but strangely, it has also become one of the places where my relationship with God has grown the most.

I’ve started realizing there is a difference between spending my life waiting for God to do something and learning to be with Him while I wait. For years, I think I treated God like the person behind the counter at a waiting room. I checked in, told Him what I needed, and then kept looking toward the door, wondering when my name would be called. My attention was fixed almost entirely on the thing I was waiting for. Somewhere along the way, that began to change.

I still have things I’m asking God to do. I still have things I’m asking God to do. I don’t think surrender means pretending those desires aren’t there. Jesus Himself asked the Father in Gethsemane if there was another way. What has been changing is my belief that life is somehow on hold until those prayers are answered. God is here too.

He’s here in the uncertainty, the unanswered prayer, on the ordinary Tuesday when nothing seems to have changed since Monday. He is even here when I have no new information and no new plan. I’m beginning to understand that the waiting isn’t an interruption in my walk with God. It is part of my walk with Him.

That’s changed the questions I’m asking. I used to spend most of my energy asking when something would change or be taken away. I’m learning to ask what God might be doing in me while it hasn’t. I don’t always get an answer to that question either, and maybe that’s okay. There are parts of formation we probably don’t recognize until years later. I’ve looked back at seasons I once begged God to end and realized they shaped something in me that I desperately needed, even though I couldn’t see it at the time.

I want to be careful saying that because I don’t believe every painful thing happens because God is trying to teach us a lesson. I’ve heard that offered to hurting people far too quickly. Some things are simply painful and leave scars. Some prayers remain unanswered in ways I don’t understand, and I don’t think faith requires us to pretend otherwise. What I do believe is that God refuses to waste any of it. He can meet us in places we never would have chosen. He can form something in us while we’re still asking Him to change the circumstances around us. Sometimes the thing I was convinced needed to change first was the very place where I eventually came to know Him differently.

I’m still not good at waiting. I don’t know that I ever will be. Part of me still wants the plan, the timeline, and assurance that everything will work out the way I hope. I still catch myself trying to figure out what God hasn’t chosen to explain yet. There are days when I have peace with that and days when I don’t. But I don’t think waiting feels quite as empty as it once did.

Maybe that’s because I’m slowly learning that God isn’t standing at the end of the waiting, asking me to find my way to Him. He hasn’t gone ahead and left me behind until I finally learn whatever lesson I’m supposed to learn. He’s present in the middle of it, even on the days when I can’t make sense of what He’s doing. For someone like me, that has taken a long time to learn. I used to think faithfulness meant knowing the next thing and having the courage to do it. Sometimes it does. Sometimes God makes the next step clear, and obedience means moving.

Other times, I’ve done everything I know to do, prayed everything I know to pray, and there’s no other move to make. I’m beginning to believe that staying there with God requires its own kind of faith. Not because I’ve given up or stopped believing something can change, but because I’m finally learning I don’t have to manufacture tomorrow’s outcome. I can live the day God has given me, keep my hands open, and trust Him with the parts of the story He hasn’t shown me yet.

I still don’t particularly like waiting. But I’m beginning to understand that the waiting room isn’t empty.