Thoughts on Waiting Well {When You Hate to Wait}

Thank you so much for praying for my niece, Addy. Her latest update is here and now all we can do is pray and wait and see if her spine straightens enough for the second surgery.

Waiting has been on my mind lately since we’ve been doing so much of it.

I’ve been thinking about what waiting is good for, and how to wait well when you really hate it and are 100% unable to change your situation.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t wait. The cashier at the grocery store would be focused and quick, the doctor would see my kids at the pre-determined appointment time and not a minute later. The UPS delivery would happen on the day they scheduled, fast food would be fast, and the repair man would come in the two hour window he promised.

Having to wait in a restaurant or in a line for long periods of time is frowned upon in our fast-paced, crazy busy culture. We equate movement with productivity, and waiting to inefficiency, bad service, and wasting our precious time.

(I’m not sure that all of our fast paced efficiency has benefited us. Has it made us kinder, more attentive neighbors? And I’m not sure what we did with the time we saved by hurrying?)

Maybe we’re mature enough to forbear a little inconvenience on our time in the grocery line or at the doctor’s office, but how do we wait when the trial goes on longer than we’d ever imagined and the issues are serious, like waiting for a spine to straighten, a cancer-free report, a wayward child to come home, a relational trial to be over, financial relief, or for someone entangled in life-dominating sin that affects you every day to get over it already, learn their lessons, clean up their act, and grow up? Do we despair or try to control the situation?

James reminds us to “count it all joy when you fall into divers temptations, knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.” (James 1:3)

I want the patience, and so do you, but usually we want to by-pass that trial part that brings the patience.

How do we change our mindset about waiting?

Elisabeth Elliot gives this insight: “I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.”

Waiting should realign our will to God’s. It gives us time to grow, and is a necessary dormancy, a season of rest, like a God-given time to learn, take in, draw closer, and rejuvenate our spirit,  like the ground as it rests in winter tucked under a blanket of snow.

Crop rotation is an important farming principle. The ground needs rest in order to produce higher yield. The soil’s life-giving minerals and nutrients are increase by resting so that in due time, a bud will break through the cold sod, bearing all the new life that was hidden below the ground.

Wouldn’t we benefit more if we stopped wrestling with God’s timetables, and embraced His sovereignty, and with eyes toward heaven willingly lay dormant–not in a depressed state– but in an eyes-toward-heaven, receiving state, like a newborn-babe-taking-in-milk kind of nourishment state.

Waiting reminds us that we are dust-made creatures who are dependent on the Creator.

It is God who works in us and through us, and His times for growth and change are His business. And His timetables for change for others are His business as well. Our business is to submit to the wait, be of good courage, expect Him to do what is best, and let Him give the increase.

The inconvenience of waiting teaches us patience, a virtue that our crazy-busy world could use a little bit more of.

Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD. Ps. 27:14