What Happens When We Wait?
For most of us, we have been waiting a long time in this pandemic. Waiting for things to get back to normal. Waiting for peace in the midst of political and racial unrest. Waiting for schools to open back up so we can send our kids and get some work done. Waiting for God to come through on our very desperate prayers for financial provision.
Perhaps some of us have been waiting for God to answer our very personal prayers - for a child, for healing, for reconciliation in our marriage. Waiting to travel and see friends or family. Waiting for leaders to make decisions about the future. Waiting for change. Waiting for our churches to open back up.
If you’re like me, you’ve been really restless in the waiting. It seems like such a waste, doesn’t it? Why doesn’t God just get on with answering these prayers? How much more time will go by before we see a difference? What are our leaders waiting for? Can’t they get on with change!
If you’re restless, let me encourage you that waiting isn’t a waste. We can learn a lot about waiting from the patterns of things that grow and the lives of those who waited in Scripture.
What Are You Waiting For?
Waiting for Harvest in Winter
Laborers in the harvest field work and sweat tirelessly, hoping for a positive result from what they plant. Then there are the many months of silence and stillness in the winter months in-between the sowing and reaping seasons.
During seasons like this, fears often surface about whether or not the seeds we have sacrificially planted can withstand the darkness, and if our hopes will die in the soil. Doubts abound – “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this,” “Maybe this was a waste of time,” “Maybe I should invest myself in other things instead - another ministry, another club, another career that might produce more fruit.” “Maybe it’s not worth waiting for, dreaming for, hoping for.” “Maybe I’ll never see the transformation I long for in my unbelieving friends or family.”
We are tempted in those moments to move on to greener pastures where fruit seems to crop up a little more quickly and is a little less costly, or to try to control the situation, or to simply fall asleep and give up waiting for the dawn.
So, if we’re not supposed to fall asleep, fight, or run away in seasons of waiting, what are we supposed to do? I believe there are 2 primary things we can and should do:
Acknowledge your helplessness and ask for help
Ask God to show you what He’s doing underground
Acknowledge Your Helplessness and Ask for Help
We are often looking out to the fields to see what we can do or fix the situation, when at times all there is left to do is acknowledge how hungry, tired, and helpless we really are.
It’s really counter-intuitive to Western culture to admit that you don’t know the answers, can’t fix it, and need help. But this is the kind of pride that keeps us from seeing how truly limited and human we are.
This virus, this racial and political season have made us tired and hungry.
We are tired.
Tired of striving. Tired of human answers to problems. Tired of division. Tired of trying to figure it out. Tired of having to adjust daily to changes. Tired of words we keep hearing like “uncertain, unprecedented, and coronavirus.”
We are hungry.
Hungry for provision. Hungry for stability and security. Hungry for solutions. Hungry for meaning. Hungry for purpose. Hungry for rest. Hungry for justice and healing.
It is here - this pivot point of immense exhaustion and hunger that we recognize how totally helpless we really are.
We are helpless.
And it is only in our helplessness that we are able to come to a place of full surrender. A place of utter dependence. A place where we are more tired and hungry than we have ever been and there is nowhere else to go but God.
Perhaps in this cultural moment, our world is more helpless than we have ever been. Or, perhaps more readily noticing how helpless we actually are. The illusion of control and self-sufficiency is gone. We are seeing that we really can’t do this on our own - no matter how much we thought we did before this mess.
So perhaps we are now more ready to receive the kind of rest and nourishment He alone can provide. When you are hungry, you go where there is food. When you are tired, you go where there is rest. And let’s be real - those things aren’t coming anywhere else. We have been totally and utterly emptied of everything and anything that has promised to fill us and give us rest.
We are helpless. And that is the best place to be in God’s economy.
As Ole Hallesby, a Norwegian theologian and author says,
“Your helplessness is your best prayer. It calls from your heart to the heart of God with greater effect than all your uttered pleas. He hears it from the very moment that you are seized with helplessness, and He becomes actively engaged at once in hearing and answering the prayer of your helplessness”
He hears your helpless prayers when you turn on the news and can’t make sense of what you see.
He hears your helpless prayers that you don’t even have time to utter when you are overwhelmed by the virtual schooling for your kids.
He hears your helpless prayers when you check your bank account.
He hears your helpless prayers when you get on social media and instantly want to go hide.
He hears your helpless prayers when it feels like no one cares or sees you.
He hears your helpless prayers when you are fed up with seeking change with no real result.
He hears your helpless prayers when it feels like no one wants your voice.
He hears your helpless prayers when you’re not sure how you’re going to get to the next day.
Our helpless prayers are precious to God. He is moved by our prayers of utter helplessness and dependence. And He desires to provide everything and more than what we need.
In our helplessness, we call out to God for restoration. But we are also invited to ask the hard questions. “Why is this happening? What are you doing?” And those prayers are precious too.
Ask to See What He’s Doing Underground
There was a season just after we had gone through incredible losses in ministry – leaders walking away from the community, moral failures, miscarriages, divorce, you name it. It was bad. I remember turning to my staff team one day and asking them, “When are we going to be done sowing in tears?”
I found myself waking up each morning with a heavy cloud of depression weighing on my chest every day until around 3pm when it would gradually lift.
In this season, it was tough to get out of bed. It was tough to get back to campus when we had suffered so many defeats and hadn’t seen a breakthrough for months.
What I could see above ground:
During that time, we looked, waited, and watched for God to answer our prayers – to connect us to new students who could breathe new life into the community, to send us potential leaders, to bring transformation into the lives of students and the ministry as a whole, to bring healing in our personal lives.
But most of the time, we encountered silence. It seemed like our prayers kept hitting the ceiling and bouncing back to us, and we were left to wait and contemplate in the ashes.
We tried many things, many new structures, many new attempts to reach new students or help them encounter Jesus, but it seemed like all our efforts produced very little fruit.
I lamented to my supervisor all the losses we had incurred, shaking my head over and over as I recounted grief after grief, feeling hopeless. At this moment, she could have said – “Ok, let’s problem solve. Let’s assess the situation and figure out what went wrong. Let’s try to figure out how to fix it.” But she didn’t.
Instead, she gently encouraged,
“Let’s ask the Lord what He’s doing in this season and what He wants to teach us.”
Grateful that she didn’t give me one more strategy to try, we did.
I sensed the Lord whisper,
“Bette, I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, but the ground must be prepared to receive it. I am causing you and your students to thirst so that when I bring the streams and the rain it won’t be wasted on ungrateful hearts. I am causing you to wait, to hunger, to thirst, so that you will drink in my rain when it comes and it will yield fruit.
I am emptying you of relying on yourself and your own strength so that the goodness that comes will be from me. This is not about you and your accomplishments – I am stripping you of your independence and fear of not meeting human goals so that my provision will be seen as truly mine and not yours.”
Maybe in our waiting, God is just preparing the ground. Maybe there are places in our hearts that are hard, that need to be tilled a bit. Broken down in the waiting. For me, it was pride in my own accomplishments that needed to be broken apart by God. He wanted me to increase my hunger and thirst for him - and that’s what winter and desert seasons will do. They will deepen your hunger and cause you to become more ready for what He will bring.
God’s work Under the Soil
What if God is more concerned about what is happening in the soil of our hearts than what we see above ground?
What if God’s goal isn’t to bring us to a quick resolution, but is painstakingly slow, intentional, and relentless in the work of who we are becoming along the way?
God was showing me that despite my perspective that He wasn’t doing anything, He was intimately involved. He wasn’t far off. He wasn’t aloof, but He had a purpose that He wanted to accomplish in me in my suffering. And there was no other way to accomplish that than the work of waiting.
Apparently He wasn’t done with freeing me from my drive for success and putting my worth in my accomplishments. He had more work to do, and it required waiting for me to fully surrender to that work. And to Him, that was more important than ministry breakthrough at the time.
What God Does in the Waiting
Breakthrough came when I stopped trying to control or fix the suffering, but chose to surrender and sit with God in the midst of it and ask Him what He was up to. It came when I had nowhere else to go. It came when I repented of the ways I was trying to do things in my own strength.
In the waiting, God protects us from pride and self-sufficiency and gives us the opportunity instead to seek out the only one who can bring the light of spring.
When we are forced to wait, we grow a kind of hunger in us that increases over time; a kind of deep longing that grows with each day. We come face to face with our own insecurities and what we often cling to for hope – our abilities, the people around us, our structures, systems and training, etc. In the barrenness of winter months, those things sometimes don’t produce fruit and we find that by themselves they are meaningless.
God shows his loving hand to us in this – should we find abundant fruit every time we set our hands to the plow, we would become proud. We would be tempted to believe that it is because of our great strength and ability that we reap a harvest instead of God’s goodness, provision, and mercy.
And then when God answers our prayers and fulfills our hopes, these gifts are not “wasted on ungrateful hearts.” In the waiting, we are pruned of entitlement and pride until all that is left in the reaping is thankfulness and joy. For fruit reaped with hubris rots on the vine, but fruit reaped with gratitude is the sweetest kind there is.
Reflect:
In what ways are you helpless? If you don’t feel helpless, ask Him to help you become helpless in your prayers. Invite Him to help you surrender control of your circumstances or the circumstances of the world.
Ask God to show you what He is doing “underground” in the soil of your heart or in the world.
A Prayer:
Lord,
My perception of my life and the world is so limited. I have been holding onto control to keep things together. I admit that when I hold onto control based on my own view of things, I fall short and it keeps me from seeing You and others clearly.
Set me free with your truth. Put to death my old self that clings to self-protection and help me to surrender vulnerably to You so that You might expand me into something new. Help me to see you as you are and behold you in your glory. And may I be radically changed as a result. Lead me from worship into action to seek Your Kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven.
Amen
