WAITING IS NOT WASTING
(8-minute read)
Singapore is well-known for its queuing culture. In fact, some even say that queuing is a national pastime for Singaporeans, and the longer the waiting lines, the better are the deals ahead!
For all of us, waiting is an inevitable part of life. While we may not know how long we have to wait sometimes, waiting is always transient and involves getting something at the end of the process. We put in time to wait after estimating if a desired outcome is worth the wait. Do we want to wait for a bad situation to turn around, or do we exit? Do we wait for a loved one to have a change of heart for Jesus, or do we give up? There is also a distinction between voluntary and involuntary waiting. Unplanned life transitions preceded by death, divorce, illness or job loss can generate great agony and confusion as we adjust to the new realities and wait for better days ahead.
There are several men and women in the Bible who had to wait for years on end before they received what God promised or planned for them. Abraham and Sarah waited 25 years for the son that God promised them Himself. Joseph spent 13 years in wrongful imprisonment and slavery before his promotion to become the second-in-command to Pharaoh, entrusted with overseeing the land's resources during a time of famine. Moses spent 40 years in the Egyptian palace as a prince, another 40 years working for his father-in-law, Jethro, before God called him from the burning bush to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, and another 40 years circling the desert with a bunch of stubborn and backbiting Israelites before he caught a glimpse of the Promised Land. David waited about 15 years before he became king instead of taking the shortcut by killing Saul. Mary waited 33 years to see the realization of the prophecies spoken about Jesus at His birth. Finally, after His Resurrection, Jesus instructed about 120 people to not leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 1:4-5). Ten days passed before they encountered the Holy Spirit.
As we can see, waiting on God is a fundamental and necessary discipline for all believers. Traditional beliefs about productivity and efficiency suggest that waiting is an inefficient use of time. This is true if we do nothing and stay passive while waiting. The Bible, however, shows us three important things to focus on while we wait on God:
1. TIME TO KNOW GOD AND HIS WILL
Let’s be honest, not many of us like to wait. What we do while we wait on God determines how we will experience the situation and see what a good outcome looks like. Waiting is a time to discover who God has become in our daily existence. It is a mistake to plunge ourselves into a flurry of activities, leaving no time to read the Bible and engage God in prayer during the time of waiting.
While we wait, we examine how much we have been using God or trusting Him all along. To be sure, God is not more real only when He delivers the goods, or when life follows an order that is comfortable and acceptable to us. Who is God to us when the waiting has no end in sight? The Bible tells us that when David was being pursued and betrayed by his closest allies and friends, he continued to acknowledge the goodness of God even as he dealt with unremitting anguish.
Why does God want us to approach Him when we are waiting? Here are two guiding Scriptures:
“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” (1 John 5:14).
“Have you never heard? Have you never understood? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of all the earth. He never grows weak or weary. No one can measure the depths of His understanding… But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28, 31).
Waiting is a time to develop a healthy conversational relationship with God. There is no queue to access God. When we approach God, we must know that He delights in revealing Himself to us. We can safely put aside all performance-oriented thinking and place ourselves in a very vulnerable position before Him. We are important to Him and He is never too caught up in something else.
David prayed, “Make me know Your ways, O Lord; Teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; for You I wait all the day.” (Psalm 25:4-5 NASB).
2. TIME TO BUILD CHARACTER
For good or bad – our character is built over time. In the waiting period, God desires to shape and mold our character to who He wants us to be. We miss the point when we only talk to Him about issues and not about ourselves. It also doesn’t help when we simply confess humble-sounding mumbo jumbo like ‘I’m sorry for feeling angry/disappointed/hurt’ to gloss over issues of injustice and injury. Rather, it is humbling and makes more sense to simply ask God to show us what we need to see about ourselves and other actors involved in our situation.
We can easily miss God’s best due to pride and impatience, and proceed to do things by our own playbook. However, we are reminded that we reap what we sow and God cannot be mocked. (Galatians 6:7). God won’t take credit for successes that come from our own playbooks.
At the same time, God can be frustrated with our lack of progress in the area of character maturity. He said, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.” (Isaiah 30:15)
In the time that David and Joseph waited till they were ready for their positions of power, God was creating His grand narratives. God knows that the longer we have to wait, the weaker we become in our resolve to hold fast to Him. As such, He assures us that in our weakness, His power becomes perfectly effective! (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Isaiah 40:29-30 shows a clear binary between the negative impact that waiting can have on people and the impact that God has on those whose hope is in Him. “He gives power to the weak and strength to the powerless. Even youths will become weak and tired, and young men will fall in exhaustion.”
Character transformation goes hand in hand with Christian growth. As we trust God’s unseen hand at work in the details of our situations, we turn waiting into a time of being strengthened by the Word of God, allowing it to mold our perception and experience of life.
3. TIME TO BUILD TRUST
Trust is about fully leaning on God with the full dead weight of unquestionable faith, even when nothing in our situation seems to be improving, and it seems as though we have made little or no progress. We trust God more than the signals of anxiety, worry and fear from our emotions and past experience.
Contrary to common thinking, trusting in God is not about resigning to the status quo and there is no virtue in letting an undesirable situation persist. People who are averse to taking risks often misquote God to remain timid and passive. Yet, those who trust in God choose to obey Him and become disrupters even when they have no knowledge of how things will pan out in the end.
We have this promise from Isaiah 40:31: “But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.”
Waiting at the precipice of critical turning points can be emotionally draining, evoking self-doubt, and take a toll on our mental well-being. But the Holy Spirit who is our Wonderful Counselor knows exactly how we feel for “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” (Romans 8:26-27).
The Psalmist penned this refrain in Psalm 130:5-6, “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in His word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.” When we wait on God, we put all our hope in ‘the everlasting God, the Creator of all the earth’ who is bigger than any challenges we face.
Trusting God is a zero sum game with God on the winning side. Daniel’s three friends provided us the perfect example of this when they literally stood their ground in a blazing furnace when challenged to bow to idols (read Daniel 3:16-18).
As believers, we accept waiting as God’s divine setup to prepare us for what’s ahead. It may take weeks, months or years but it will not last forever. We do not waste the waiting time when we take the time to pray and process what we are going through with God, instead of scrolling through our phones or the social media to numb our feelings, or getting drowned in activities.
Waiting seasons can be hard. As Dr Henry Cloud pointed out, our best and worst seasons are also about who is in that season with us. The trajectory of life is rarely as predictable and certain as we'd like, and waiting is just par for the course. But as we know, where we will land depends on how we wait, so let us wait well and not waste the waiting.
This is a summary and reflection based on a virtual BIR Session held on 25 May 2024.
