Waiting Isn't a Waste: The Surprising Comfort of Trusting God in the Uncertainties of Life

by Mark Vroegop

Waiting on God is living on what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life.

Life is full of gaps, moments or seasons when we are invited to wait. But if we’re not careful and thoughtful, we can fill those gaps with spiritually unhelpful responses.

The Bible commends and commands something that everything in us and everyone around us usually sees as negative.

But the common thread between them is looking for something or someone with eager expectation.

When you find the word wait in the Bible, it’s important to look for the words it’s pointing toward.

Putting this together, we can see that biblical waiting is connected to what we’re looking for or where we place our trust. In this way, the gaps of life present an opportunity for faith. Sometimes the translators use “hope” for the same word translated as “wait” in other verses (see Ps. 69:6; Isa. 8:17; Jer. 14:22). That’s because waiting and hope are overlapping ideas. To wait is to look with hope.

“This is the blessedness of waiting upon God, that it takes our eyes and thoughts away from ourselves, even our needs and desires, and occupies us with our God.”3 As I said in the introduction, I’m going to point you toward this vision of waiting: living on what you know to be true about God when you don’t know what’s true about your life. When practiced correctly, it means embracing the gaps in life as an opportunity to place our hope in God.

You can probably think of a time in your life when waiting led you to say things that were rash and spiritually immature. Panic often creates sinful responses.

They created alternative gods that gave them a sense of control. They filled the gaps in their life with fake gods. A failure to wait can lead to spiritual decline and terrible choices.

Sometimes we don’t get waiting right because we’re not prepared for how hard it is.

That can feel threatening because information creates solutions.

Waiting for information creates a painful gap. It’s hard because understanding what is happening gives us a sense of control. Uncertainty reveals vulnerability.

“The tension you feel as you try to simultaneously hope in heaven while living wholeheartedly in this life isn’t necessarily an indicator of sinful discontentment. It may simply be evidence that you are a citizen of heaven living on earth.”

It seems to me we tend to forget how normal it is to wait, and it shows up in our surprise and annoyance. Just think with me about how many times you’ve been shocked when waiting enters your life. I’d like to press on this pattern.

“Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes,” identifies that the twentieth century witnessed an increase in communication speed by a factor of ten million and an increase in data transmission speed by a factor of ten billion.

The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of proportion to the delay.

“waiting for God is one of the central experiences of the Christian life.”6 It’s no wonder that this theme made its way into the songs God’s people sang. A quick search reveals fourteen different psalms that celebrate waiting.

More than any other book in the Bible, Psalms records the heart language of God’s people. In their struggle and through their faith, they kept seeking God’s help. It’s no wonder that waiting appears often, because every believer has seasons of waiting.

Waiting isn’t a supplemental experience of the Christian life. It’s central.

Have you ever considered that God could have immediately raised Jesus from the dead after he cried, “It is finished” (John 19:30)? Instead, a time of waiting—days of grief, confusion, and fear—was built into the divine plan.

waiting is what you do when you can’t do what you want to do.

Have you heard of the work problem called “quiet quitting”? I started reading more about it over the last few years. It describes employees who show up to work, but they do the bare minimum. They’re deeply unmotivated. They’re not flourishing. They’ve stopped caring about their work. They’ve quit, but they’re still at work.

Apathy is just another defense mechanism to control our disappointment.

We are sure that the Lord will continue his blessings to his people. He does not give and take. What he has granted us is the token of much more. That which we have not yet received is as sure as that which has already come. Therefore, let us wait before the Lord and be still. . . . Many things are questionable, but of the Lord we sing “for his mercies shall endure, ever faithful, ever sure.”1

Waiting requires living by what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life.

Waiting is a frequent and often painful reminder that we’re not in control.

It’s an opportunity to use uncertainty as the means of spiritual growth and intimacy with your Savior. Sadly, many of us waste these seasons because we’re not thinking this way about our waiting. We’re just reacting, emoting, and (usually) sinning.

The most common word for waiting in the Old Testament is qavah. It’s used forty-seven times from Genesis to Malachi, and the meaning is “to look with eager expectation.”

It feels more like empty space. It seems to be entirely passive, something happening to me. Qavah helps us to see waiting as purposeful, even productive.

The second most common word is yahal. It’s used forty-two times in the Old Testament, and the nuance is more directly tied to confidence or hope.4 In fact, the translators of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, often used the Greek word hope for this Hebrew word. Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord! (Ps. 31:24) But for you, O Lord, do I wait; it is you, O Lord my God, who will answer. (Ps. 38:15)

To wait and hope are interchangeable in the Bible.

Understanding the biblical connection between wait and hope invites us to shift our focus from what’s not true about our lives to what is true about God. In other words, waiting biblically is seeing seasons of delay as opportunities to hope in God.

remember to wait FAST: focus, adore, seek, and trust.

Andrew Murray compares it to moving into the sunshine: Come, and however feeble you feel, just wait in His presence. As a feeble, sickly invalid is brought out into the sunshine to let its warmth go through him, come with all that is dark and cold in you into the sunshine of God’s holy, omnipotent love, and sit and wait there, with the one thought: Here I am, in the sunshine of His love. As the sun does its work in the weak one who seeks its rays, God will do His work in you.

Eugene Peterson says this: Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that waiting means you are doing nothing. Usually it just means that you’re not doing what you want to do.

You are not going to wait on yourself to see what you feel and what changes come to you. You are going to wait on God, to know first, what He is, and then, after that, what He will do.

blindness to my expectations created a lot of additional stress, especially with anything related to waiting.

Waiting requires patience beyond my expectations.

The major English translations include the word patiently in the first verse. But if you were to look in the original Hebrew, you won’t find it. There’s no word for “patiently” in verse 1. A Hebrew word for patiently is available and could have been included. David just didn’t use it. Instead, he merely repeated the word qavah (“wait”) twice. This led Eugene Peterson to translate Psalm 40:1 this way: “I waited and waited and waited for God” (MSG). While there’s nothing incorrect about adding the word patience to capture the meaning, does “I waited and waited and waited” land on you differently? It does for me. And I’ve found it helpful. Here’s why. It shows me that patience starts by simply waiting more than what I’ve wanted or expected.

Waiting patiently embraces the uncomfortable addition of more time.

Part of the challenge with our expectations is that we often don’t realize we have them.

Patience is created as we value what God is doing in our life through the tension.

Our private and public prayer are our chief expression of our relation to God: it is in them chiefly that our waiting upon God must be exercised. . . . Bow quietly before God, just to remember and realize who He is, how near He is, how certainly He can and will help. Just be still before Him and allow His Holy Spirit to waken and stir up in your soul the child-like disposition of absolute dependence and confident expectation. Wait upon God as a Living Being, as the Living God, who notices you, and is just longing to fill you with His salvation.

Not only do we need to wait the right way; we also need to wait right away.

Waiting on God is linked to spiritual empowerment. It isn’t merely what Christians do when they’re stuck and powerless. It’s what they do because of its close connection to hope.

Waiting on God is a choice to face uncertainty differently.

Being a watchman involves both a required task and a role to embrace.

The greatest saints are not those who need less grace but those who consume the most grace, who indeed are most in need of grace, those who are saturated by grace in every dimension of their being. Grace to them is like breath.4 The idea of breathing grace was helpful to my soul and the process of sanctification in my life. I think the same thing is true for waiting.

Consider what it would look like if you planned for a few days to wait on the Lord before making a decision. What if churches had committed times of waiting before moving forward on a new initiative? Imagine a strategic plan that included waiting as a vital part of its process or implementation.