Waiting Stinks!
Spring! The days are longer, the air is warmer, the buds are sprouting up – it’s a season of anticipation and new life. All of it feels so fresh, so exciting, so hopeful! And this goes right along with our tradition of celebrating Easter Sunday – the day we remember that Jesus went to insane lengths, even beating death itself, to show us that God loves us and wants to be in a relationship with us.
But there’s another part of spring that’s a bit harder, and for me, it’s generally embodied in the month of March – waiting. Waiting for the flowers to finally bloom, waiting for the last cold snap to clear, waiting for baseball to start…waiting stinks.
But, there’s something holy in waiting and in anticipation. Our God proves that he is a God of process and sometimes even waiting. Think about the creation story. God of the universe – capable of creating everything in existence in a single snap – chose to describe the act of creation over a series of several days. It was a process and a slow unfolding. A day of work with a pause to rest in the goodness of the day’s work. And the Israelites waited a long time before they met their Savior. As a matter of fact, there were 400 years of waiting, silence, and anticipation.
And then there is Jesus! Savior of the whole world sent as a baby! As the mother of a baby right now, I can tell you that babyhood is a lot of waiting. On that note, as a God ready to save the world, why send the answer as a baby who has to grow into a man? A creator God who can make anything surely could have sent a grown man to immediately enact his plan. Instead, God gifted the world a baby, and a childhood, and adolescence – the Savior of the world experienced all of the processes of human growth and becoming. Even as he entered adulthood, he waited to begin his career. He worked as a carpenter before he began his public ministry. All in all, Jesus only spent 3 of his 33 years of life in active ministry proclaiming the love of God before he was crucified! So, why is our God making us wait? What’s in this process for us?
The process of waiting does a few things in the human heart and as we become aware of these things, our moments of waiting can become more glorifying to God. First, waiting makes us slow down. We want to rush right into things, but, as we can see, God is not in a hurry. So, why are we? Slowing down does a few things for us – it causes us to focus, it causes us to rest which leads to renewal, it makes space for deep work, thought, and reflection, and it helps us take our eyes off of the chaos of micro day-to-day moments to instead focus on the macro view of our lives and beyond.
Second, waiting shifts our desires to God himself. In the chaos and quickness of immediate gratification, we run to whatever’s going to fill us fastest. When we’re slammed into seasons of waiting, we have to shift our longing and desire to a deeper more enduring source, God himself.
Third, as we wait, our faith is often exposed as either growing in God or receding away from him. Seasons of waiting lay us bare and help us to see who we’ve been trusting during the rapidly-paced seasons. When there is no end in sight, we either experience a feeling of deep peace in who God is or we experience anxiety that’s entangled in the practice of putting our faith in concrete answers. In our waiting, we get a chance to examine where we are placing our faith and we get a chance to course-correct for the season ahead.
Finally, the most holy thing about waiting is that at the end of the wait God’s glory is revealed. Let’s think back to Easter – Jesus, promised Messiah, was killed and buried and then laid there for three days. Can you imagine the anguish and waiting that Jesus’ followers must have experienced in those three days? I can imagine each of the disciples walking through the stages of waiting I outlined above and realizing that they were having an immense crisis of faith! And then the Good News – He’s gone from the tomb! Jesus is alive again?! Is it true? Some of the disciples had to wait even longer to see Jesus with their own eyes, but finally, at the end of their waiting, God’s glory was revealed. Jesus was alive again and death was defeated.
Right now we are in a continued season of waiting. We’re rounding the corner towards normalcy after experiencing a year of pandemic lifestyle. Yet we are still in limbo, waiting! We can feel the hopefulness of a new season ahead, but we wait. As you head towards what’s next, take some time to reflect on your season of waiting. Have you experienced the three stages listed above? Have you taken some time to intentionally think through this season at all? What is God teaching you? How do you anticipate seeing God’s glory revealed at the end of your waiting?
Waiting stinks, and waiting is holy. Hold on to hope and get ready for God’s coming glory.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 “That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.”