Wait For It
Everybody's favorite thing...
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.
(Psalm 130:5-6)
I don’t like to wait. No one does. It’s probably why the first person to imagine a smartphone came up with the idea. The fact is, most people don’t wait anymore. Instead, we pull out our phones and do something while standing in line or sitting in the drive-through. We’re not waiting—we’re just working in a different location (or killing our brain cells with mindless doomscrolling).
Waiting requires us to be still.
The Bible talks a lot about waiting. See Isaiah 40:30-31; Psalm 27:14; Lamentations 3:26; Habbakuk 2:3; Titus 2:13; or James 5:7-8, to name a few. Waiting is simply part of the human experience. And it’s more than that. Romans 8:19-22 says that all Creation is groaning as it awaits the Day Christ returns to free it from its bondage to decay.
Waiting is inevitable.
It’s one thing to wait for your server to refill your coffee. It’s another thing to wait for the Lord. How many times do we, like Sarah and Abraham with Hagar, try to make God’s will happen on our own rather than wait for Him? It only makes life harder. We can’t rush God any more than the night watchmen can make the sun rise earlier. God will move when He will. God will speak when He will. God is God, and we are not. His is to move, ours is to wait.
It’s easy to get frustrated when waiting on God if we think God is supposed to be doing something for us. “Why hasn’t God fixed this yet? Why hasn’t God opened the door yet? What is He doing anyway?” It’s kind of like waiting for that coffee to be refilled, but on a much larger scale.
But what if we turn the tables? What if we are the servant and God is the Master? A servant waiting on his master is standing by, keeping a watchful eye, waiting for his master’s cue so that he can carry out his master’s wish.
Waiting is worship.
God is not a lazy server, slow to get our coffee refilled. Nor is He a distracted servant, too busy to notice how often we’re waving Him over to give Him our orders. God is the Master, and we wait on His command. What if we reframe our waiting on God as our waiting on God’s order? We may feel stuck, but God is in control. While we wait for His cue, let’s fix our eyes on Him with adoration and admiration. There’s nothing better to do while waiting than that.