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God Is Working in Your Waiting
You are not at the
mercy of your circumstances
Article
by
Jade
Mazarin
Guest
Contributor
“There is actually
something happening while nothing is happening. God uses waiting to change us.”
Most parents would
agree that their children don’t want to wait for anything.
The last thing kids
want to hear is Mom say, “Not now.”
It can prompt anger,
frustration, even hopelessness.
This “dis-ease” of
waiting follows most of us into our adult years.
We may not respond
with the same emotional outbursts as children, but most of us still hate
waiting for what we want.
And our modern
society just makes it worse. We want everything done quickly — and new devices
constantly spring up to meet those demands and encourage our impatience.
We are not used to
waiting, and the more our technology caters to our immediate desires, the less
we feel willing to wait.
Such is our dilemma
as Christians. While society makes every attempt to make our life easier and
faster, God works on a very different timetable.
In his mind, nothing
is wrong with waiting. In fact, waiting can actually be a positive good that he
often uses to make us more like his Son.
God Works While We
Wait
Something actually
happens while nothing is happening. God uses waiting to change us.
“There
is actually something happening while nothing is happening. God uses waiting to
change us.”
The story of Adam and
Eve is a story of rebellion against God.
Once they believed
that God didn’t have their best interests in mind, they decided to go ahead
without God and do what they wanted.
They became, in
effect, their own god. Too often, this is exactly what we do today.
When God tells us to
wait, we don’t trust him, but go ahead and find ways to accomplish what we want
to happen.
This tendency to push
God to the side goes against his plan for us. It creates distance in our
relationship with him.
It causes us to get
into trouble and brings pain.
What good is it to
gain the whole world now — whatever it is we think we want — and forfeit our
souls’ intimacy with God (Mark
8:36)?
God wants us to learn
how to follow him and put down our demanding selves — to calm that screaming
child in us.
One way he helps us
do this is to say, “Wait.”
That miserable,
uncomfortable, sometimes painful state of silence is one of God’s most powerful
tools to set us free.
If we are willing,
that is.
Choosing at the
Crossroads
We don’t start out
willing to wait. Our natural response to waiting is often anger or doubt.
Fortunately, God is
gracious and merciful, understanding of our tendencies.
Simply feeling deep,
complex emotions in waiting — especially for significant things, like a
pregnancy or a job — is not necessarily sinful in itself. But we can decide
where those emotions take us.
We can decide to
exalt these feelings. We might act on them by taking matters into our own
hands.
Or perhaps we will
not act, but we’ll make an idol out of the good for which we are waiting —
every passing day is another log on the fires of bitterness, impatience,
ingratitude, perhaps even resentment against the God who won’t give us what we
want.
Or, by God’s grace,
we can choose to wait as he intends.
“Waiting
on the Lord is the opposite of running ahead of the Lord, and it’s the opposite
of bailing out on the Lord,” writes John Piper.
“It’s
staying at your appointed place while he says stay, or it’s going at his
appointed pace while he says go. It’s not impetuous, and it’s not despairing.”
We have the choice,
then, to take a deep breath, release our clenched hands, and let God be God.
And we are invited to
continue hoping in his greatness.
Pray for God to Work
in You
Certainly, only one
of these options will bring us joy.
As we seek to accept
and rejoice in God’s handling of our lives, including his timing, we can ask
God to work in us two main things, so that our waiting is not in vain: humility
and trust.
1. Humility
Sometimes, when I’ve found myself getting
impatient and upset, I will remind myself that God is the one who put me here.
My life is not my own. This is humility. It is coming to realize that we are a
breath and God owes us nothing (Psalm 39:5; Luke 17:7–10).
2. Trust
Then comes trust, which means believing at
least two things about God: he is powerful, and he is loving.
“That
miserable, uncomfortable, painful silence is one of God’s most powerful tools
to set us free.”
Believing God is
powerful means that we know he is in charge of what’s happening; things are not
arbitrary or out of his control.
He is capable of both
helping us and changing things.
Much of our anxiety
in waiting is because we forget that “God is able to make all grace abound
to you” (2
Corinthians 9:8).
You are not at the
mercy of your circumstances.
Believing God is
loving means that there is care and purpose behind all that he does.
It means that he is
faithful to help us right now and bring us blessings later.
It means that his
judgment and timing is always perfectly good.
True, he owes us
nothing, yet he has promised to give us everything we need (Philippians 4:19).
Even during that long
road of silence, God cares deeply for us.
We can be like David and remind
ourselves, “Wait for the
Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Psalm 27:14).
Blessing of Waiting
in Faith
Some of the greatest
figures in the Bible — Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David — had to wait for many
years for God’s promises.
Everything that
happened in the meantime was used to prepare them, inwardly as well as
outwardly. Then, when they reached their promise, they were blessed beyond
measure.
God invites us to
trust in his goodness today and his faithfulness tomorrow.
Relinquishing control
to him is the main route to experience his love and peace. It unites our hearts
with his.
It creates a level of
maturity and character that we will take with us into the future, and it
enables us to enjoy his future blessings all the more.
Jade Mazarin is a
board-certified Christian counselor in Vero Beach, Florida. She is the author
of The
Heart’s Journey to Freedom, and writes at her site, JadeMazarin.net.
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