Eagerly waiting for my husband to return from an errand, my almost 3 year old granddaughter complained, “I miss Grampa. Waiting is hard.” So true! Snatching the opportunity to turn this into a teaching moment, I waxed eloquent about babies who cry because they cannot wait, all the way up to adults who have to learn the hard way to wait, and how the Lord uses the hard times of waiting to do good things in us and for us.
Anticipating, “Amen! Preach it Grandma!” on her part, instead I got a, “What’s that?” LOL! 🙂
Nobody likes to wait. Whether for finances to improve, relationships to mend, illnesses to heal, and on it goes. And that is probably why all through Scripture the Lord speaks to us about it. It IS hard. And no fun. We do all we can to try to speed things up. Even more so now in this instant on-demand generation.
I think waiting is at the heart of faith, and faith at the heart of waiting. God could have easily put us in fast-forward mode, but He deliberately designed us to have to wait. For almost everything that is good. If we look back at all the times we had to rely totally on Him and His promises, and proceed anyway in the dark, we might be surprised that things actually turned out okay. And how we may have even emerged stronger, more fruitful, and closer to Him because of it all.
When we wait in faith, trusting God to do as He has said, it pleases Him, and keeps us close to Him…which is where we were originally created to be. Deeply and fully satisfied.
The bottom line of our hope and our salvation rests in waiting. Faith is going forward with life in spite of not seeing what we are counting on. Relying on the shed blood of Jesus the Son of God on the cross for our sin, and banking on the eventual realization of His promises awaiting us, we take steps of faith one day at a time.
Interesting that in the Hebrew language “wait” is an active not a passive word. It means to wait with anticipation. I love this Scripture reminding us that although we all have to wait, the day WILL come when we will rejoice in the Lord, and see and experience all we have based our lives on. No more waiting. Just celebrating! Rest assured that it will be well worth the wait!
“And it will be said in that day, Look! This is our God.
We have waited for Him, and He will save us!
This is the LORD! We have waited for him,
and we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation!”
~Isaiah 25:9
