Still Waiting Quotes

“Only Jesus can hold things like this in tandem. Only Jesus can simultaneously attend to the one with the broken foot and the one with stage IV cancer. Only Jesus can concurrently care about the child withering away from starvation and the child weeping over his parents’ divorce. Only Jesus can cry with the girl sobbing over a high school breakup and the wife who is widowed, left with mouths to feed and an empty bed. He is the only one who can see that all pain is real and valid, regardless of how the world would rank it. He is the only one who can validate our suffering—and he does.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn’t Give You What You Want

“When we have begged and demanded from God all that we can, and when he still doesn't change our situation, we're left with a choice, we can choose offense with him, or we can choose obedience.

Offense is a terror of a thing: it puts us in the judgment seat over God. We strong-arm God, we yell at him, we tell him all the things he's not. And while it's good to be honest with God, there is a difference between heart-felt honesty and hostile honesty. Heartfelt honesty comes to God on its knees. Hostile honesty comes to God pointing the finger.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“This is the real, hard work of faith for most of us--not jumping of cliffs or swimming in shark-infested waters, but being willing to lay our hearts and souls before God without protection or pretense. And it's risky business.

It's risky to continue to open our hearts to the Lord when our dreams and desires don't line up with reality. Don't let anyone tell you differently. Don't let anyone make you feel like coming to the Lord should always feel warm and easy and clear-cut. It won't. It doesn't.

...He isn't bound by our ways, our timelines, our demands. He is bound by truth and love and justice and mercy--by the things he is and contains within himself.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“That's what shame did: it twisted my understanding of reality and grace. I felt ashamed that I couldn't get it together, that I constantly struggled, that I couldn't muster up enough strength to conquer this. The shame made it seem impossible for me to accept grace for my constant failures.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“Shame loves to pair itself with struggle, and it loves to make us believe that it has to stay with us in the unanswered and challenging parts of our stories.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“God doesn't look at me and see what breaks me. He looks at me and sees a child who has been loved, accepted and redeemed.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“Because once you see yourself as an outcast or as someone who doesn't fit in, the stigma doesn't need to come from anyone else. You carry it in your mind, in the folds of your persona. That's why you'll do anything to be normal again. It may not matter to anyone else that you lack what you desire. But it matters more than anything to you.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“It doesn't matter how big or small our lack seems to others—in our hearts, that lack can loom large.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“Waiting forces us to surrender our reliance on our own ability to pay up, to come through, to make it happen.

The cost of waiting demands the payment of our self-sufficiency, and we pay in our acknowledgement of our inability to be enough.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“The road of weakness, it turns out, leads us straight into waiting. It's a painful place to be. It's one we'd never choose on our own.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe your body has betrayed you, or maybe your family is falling apart. Maybe you're reeling from a broken heart or the sting of professional rejection. Maybe you struggle with the pain of unmet dreams and shelved goals that might never happen.

Whatever it is and whenever it comes from, we all know the hollow truth of brokenness, or feeling defeated, of seeing ourselves as failures.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“In ways both small and overwhelming, we all know what brokenness feels like. And sometimes our own brokenness—or the brokenness of those we love—seems like too much to bear. Whether it's buying more than we can afford or striking out in anger at the people we love or eating more than we want to or pushing people away when we need them most, we all have places where brokenness is painfully apparent in our own hearts. We all have parts of our lives where we are waiting for things to change.

Whether we're waiting for physical healing or emotional wholeness or spiritual breakthrough, we are all waiting for our brokenness to be mended. We wait because we are broken, and we are broken because we are waiting.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“God’s people are often called to be a waiting people—not because he is unkind or unloving, but rather the exact opposite. God’s people are a waiting people because he is an on-time God, not an on-demand one. So it seems we’ve got to figure out this waiting thing in a holy and wholehearted way. We all know we live in a microwave culture—”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn’t Give You What You Want

“Jesus bled too. He knows what it's like to have blood leave the body in great rivers, in unstoppable streams. He knows the reality of being ostracized. He knows what it is to have no way out of his circumstances. He knows what it is to be broken, in his heart and in his limbs. His body pulverized. His spirit abandoned. He knows what it is to wait for God to come through - and to die in the waiting.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“But those recurring failures and needs don't push the Lord away from us. Rather, our need—our unending, unfading, constant need for saving and for grace—is part of what drew him to our plight. Because we are so needy, because we are so incapable—that's why Jesus came, willingly and full of love, to save us.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“Weakness forces us into waiting—waiting for something bigger than we are to fix what is broken, to right what is wrong.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“And in that place of wanting to be healed but unable to make myself better, I had to stop trying. I had to wait.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“In one way or another, all of us find ourselves in the metaphorical hours between Friday and Sunday, because we are all waiting in some way. Waiting for test results, waiting for our marriage to turn a corner, waiting for a job that pays the bills, waiting for our child to return to God, waiting for healing, waiting for hope. Waiting.

Like the Bleeding Woman who needed a miracle, all of us need one too.

We are waiting for Jesus to swing his robe wide enough to grasp it, that we might be made whole.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“Although Jesus deeply affirms our suffering, and although he catches every tear and profoundly understands every trial we have walked through, the suffering isn't meant to be the focus of our lives. Jesus must be the focus. Anytime we take Jesus' affirmation of our suffering as carte blanche to worship our pain rather than him, we've missed the point.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"

Nothing and no one. Not even a no.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

“We don't always understand what God does or doesn't do. But we always know--we always know--that He loves us.”
― Ann Swindell, Still Waiting: Hope for When God Doesn't Give You What You Want