When You Have to Wait: Trusting When God Seems Silent
Waiting can be hard. It’s difficult to not know what’s going to happen, to be in limbo. Anxiously waiting for the answer about a job, about school, about your family can be an enormous source of stress. Eventually, things might resolve into a “yes” or a “no,” but the in-between time is hard.
Sometimes we have to wait for God. We want God to move, to act, to do. We pray about direction, about health, about emotional stability, and God is silent. There’s no answer. We have to wait, and in the waiting, we can start to feel alone, isolated, ignored.
The honest truth is it’s hard to keep trusting when God is silent, and we have to wait. Impatience is a trait we all have to some degree, and (especially in an instant, fast-paced society) waiting can seem to drag on and on and on. We need an answer; we need closure; we need direction; we need to move on. Those needs drive us to begin and take matters into our own hands, to try and force the issue, force the answer.
We want to control the outcome because we feel like God isn’t going to speak, ever move, ever do anything.
How do we wait and trust that God has our good in mind when we have to wait? How do we remain waiting, trusting ourselves to God’s care instead of our frantic scrambling to control what we cannot manage on our own?
We look to the past so we can keep trusting God for the future.
What has God done in your life? Where have you seen God? What testimony do you have to the works of God in your life and the world around you?
When we look behind us, we remind ourselves that God moves, God does work, God takes care of us. We begin to survive the waiting because we can trust that God is faithful.
Even when the answer is no, we can trust that God has our best in mind. We can trust while we wait and we can trust the answer because we have seen God move.
What can we do to help us remember?
Journal. Record what’s going on in your life and what you remember God doing. Reread your journals for encouragement so you can remember and see God’s hand, even when it’s hard to trust right now.
Tell your story. Telling what God’s done to your friends and families helps others be able to remind you when you have to wait we can still trust God. It also encourages them to trust when they have to wait.
Remind yourself that God’s ending is not our ending. God’s not done until we come alive in resurrection. Waiting isn’t the end. We can trust that God is going to finish what he started, God’s work in us.
Scripture for meditation
Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Philippians 1:6 (NIV)
Prompts for journal and discussion
What has God done in your life? Where have you seen God? What testimony do you have to the works of God in your life and the world around you?
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