Waiting is hard. No one likes to wait. When we are stuck in traffic, standing in a long line at the grocery store or watching the seconds tick by when our phone call is placed on hold, waiting feels like a huge waste of our time. But, as much as we dislike waiting, we all understand that waiting is just a part of life. And that is by design – God is not in a hurry.
God has woven a time of waiting into nearly every aspect of the natural world. A garden is one example. After you plant seeds in the ground, no matter how excited you are to see the rewards of your work, you won’t be harvesting anything the next day or even in the next few weeks. You wait and wait and wait…and on the surface, it looks like your garden is a failure. Nothing is happening. But, something actually is happening! Below the ground, where you cannot see it, nature is unfolding just the way it is supposed to. The seed coats are splitting open; moisture is causing the seeds to germinate; and they are beginning to grow. And, one day, green shoots pop through the ground, and you realize that the time you spent waiting wasn’t wasted; it was necessary.
That’s how waiting works in our lives, too. Whenever we are waiting, God is working in ways we cannot see.
Waiting is a mystery to us; we wonder, why does God, who loves us dearly – and could instantly answer our every prayer – so often instead make us wait? In this faith-based mini-book, I shared six reasons why God may sometimes make us wait for his answers; but before I delved into those reasons, I felt compelled to first say that though waiting can be frustrating, disappointing and irritating, God is never playing with our lives. Lamentations 3:33 assures us that God “takes no pleasure in…throwing roadblocks in the way” (The Message). In other words, when God makes us wait for his answer, we can be certain that because of his strong love for us, there is a wise purpose for the wait. Our faith challenge is to trust that God is, in fact, delaying in order to ultimately do what’s best for us. That’s the hard part!
Because God’s timing is always perfect, never too early and never too late, he wants us to allow his perfect timing to guide our lives. Yet, when he wisely pushes the pause button to pace us so that things happen for us at the right time, we so often misunderstand, resist and forge ahead. It’s hard for us to accept that anything that slows us down could actually be positioning us to receive a blessing, right on time.
Isaiah 64:4 plainly tells us that God “…works for those who wait for him.” That’s why when waiting is all you can do, it’s the best thing you can do. Waiting on God is never a waste of time. The key message of The Mystery of Waiting is simply this – if we are waiting, God is still working and always for our good.
