Wait Is a Four-Letter Word

The Glorious Table is thrilled to welcome Elizabeth Thompson to the table today. Elizabeth is the author of the recently released When God Says “Wait”: Navigating Life’s Detours and Delays Without Losing Your Faith, Your Friends, or Your Mind (Shiloh Run Press, March 2017).

I hate waiting.

If you haven’t noticed, wait is a four-letter word. Coincidence? I think not.

It goes something like this:

God is good. Life is . . . pretty good. We have been following Jesus for a while, and many of our prayer requests—at least the most important ones—have been answered. Our faith is strong, the future brightly shining.

But then . . . we want something. Something that can’t be bought, earned, or achieved. We have done our part—worked, grown, taken risks. We feel a promise ringing in our hearts—Surely what I have prayed for will happen, and soon!—but now we have reached the point where the decision is out of our hands, which means it is in God’s. And at first that knowledge feels comforting. Our hopes, our heart, our happiness—all in the hands of God:

God the Father, who loves us and wants us to be happy.

God the omniscient, who knows us better than we know ourselves.

God the omnipotent, who has a plan and the power to execute it.

God the Creator, who controls the cosmos (surely this one little request will be easy for Him).

All He has to do is snap His all-powerful, all-loving fingers and . . . done. Wish granted. Prayer answered.

So we turn to God with our request, asking Him to do for us The Thing we cannot do for ourselves.

But there’s a problem. He doesn’t do it.

He doesn’t not do it, either.

He does nothing. (Nothing we can see, anyway.) God doesn’t say no, but neither does He say yes. God says, “Wait.”

Wait, what?

And here’s the part that makes it really difficult to swallow: With God we don’t get the kind of two-way human conversation we are used to. With prayer there’s usually no verbal response from God, no explanation, no “Here’s My timeline for your life,” no “I hear you and I love you, but I can’t give you what you want (yet) for the following loving, logical, and comforting reasons. . . .” Instead, we pray and—nothing. Heaven resounds with His silence.

The longer the wait, the louder the silence.

But God is good, so we swallow hard and determine to wait patiently.

On good days, we turn back to prayer.

On bad days, we turn to social media. After two excruciating minutes—a contentment-shattering onslaught of clever stories, air- brushed images, and Big Exciting Announcements—we find ourselves sinking into the abyss: Everyone else is happy. Everyone else is getting the thing I need, right on schedule.

With knotted stomach and burning eyes, we try to regroup, drawing on life lessons we have collected over the years. Our earliest memories (thank you, Disney princesses) sing, “Believe in yourself! Follow your heart! Dreams come true!” Our middle and high school teachers’ voices echo, “Never give up! You will get it soon because you are awesome (everyone is awesome!), and awesome people always succeed!” Our Sunday school education encourages us, “Be the persistent widow!” Our adult theology reminds us, “Keep on asking, keep on knocking!”

So believe and dream and ask and knock and ask again and knock again we do. We turn to the Bible, to classic, sublimely comforting waiting passages like “Be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord” (Psalm 27:14), or this, the crown jewel of all the waiting passages:

Trust in the Lord and do good;

dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

Take delight in the Lord,

and he will give you the desires of your heart . . .

Be still before the Lord

and wait patiently for him.

(Psalm 37:3–4, 7)

With our faith renewed, we enjoy a little chuckle at our own expense, resign ourselves to wait patiently for a few more days (even weeks, if need be), and offer a prayer of apology for our impatience. In our contrition, we even do a heart check:

Dwelling in the land? Check.

Trusting in God? Check.

Delighting in the Lord? Well, I could read and pray a little more, but . . . as of tomorrow. Check.

And then we sit back and expect God to grant our request within the next seven to ten business days.

The problem is, we keep adding our own words to these waiting passages, and we have no idea we are doing it. We read them, we think we understand what they are saying, but we don’t realize that subconsciously we keep tacking a little, asterisked addendum onto the end of them that goes something like this:

“Be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.  . .”*

*because He is going to give you exactly what you want really, really soon.

“Delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart . . .”*

*and that is a guaranteed formula: If you work hard and love God, then you will definitely, absolutely get your heart’s desires—and “desires” includes all of your desires: admission and scholarships to the college you want; the job and salary you want; the guy and wed- ding you want; the apartment you want; the baby you want; the family you want; the friend you want; the health you want; the house you want; the happiness you want—as soon as you decide you want them . . . or pretty soon afterward.

And so, armed with our unintentionally asterisked waiting passages, we wait. We pray. We read more waiting passages. We pray some more. We try not to fidget. We delight in God. We delight in God some more. We humbly remind God that we are delighting in Him (teeth gritted, fists clenched, neck veins popping, but doggone it, if we were any more delighted, we’d have a heart attack). We alter our request to make it sound more spiritual, more like a prayer God would want to say yes to. We read more waiting passages. We get radical, and we fast. We ask friends to pray for us and fast with us.

Time passes. Too much time. More time than we’d ever imagined. As faith fades, doubts bloom. We question God, the Bible, ourselves.

The longer God’s silence stretches, the more things start to break inside.

I don’t know what you are waiting for right now, but we all are waiting for something. If you’re like me, you’re waiting on several somethings. Sometimes The Thing we seek is not even a thing, but a feeling: peace, joy, relief, release, security, home. For many of us, waiting seasons are the first time our faith has been truly tested. They present risk and opportunity in equal measure, making us ask the hard faith questions, making us fight to find—and accept—the answers.

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Excerpted from When God Says “Wait” by Elizabeth Laing Thompson with permission from Barbour Publishing

Elizabeth Laing Thompson writes at LizzyLife.com about clinging to Christ through the chaos of daily life. As a minister, speaker, and novelist, she loves finding humor in holiness, and hope in heartache. She lives in North Carolina with her preacher husband and four spunky kids, and they were totally worth the wait.

Photograph © Mattea Photography, used with permission