One the hardest things to do is wait.   I don’t mean the waiting we do when when there’s a long line to check out at the grocery store.  I mean the kind that we do when it feels like life is on hold, when what we long for deep within us has no sign of manifesting.  When you are pleading for rain, and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

We all have seasons like this.  Maybe it’s a job you need, a healing, a heart mending, or to see someone you love receive their prayers being answered.  We carry these yearnings with us wherever we go.  They are attached to us like shadows.

I am astounded, when looking at the the expanse of time that I have been holding on to an unanswered prayer, and I wonder why God has not yet done what I think He should have. Isn’t He a God of miracles?  Doesn’t He say to us to knock and the door will be opened?  I know I’ve been knocking. I know He can hear me… So why does it feel like nothing has changed?  Why does it sometimes seem that what I am believing for will never come? 

Faith is a force that keeps us standing when that is all we can do.  It is a silent hope that somehow causes us to still believe when all evidence is absent.  When there is nothing in your hands to prove that what you hope for will ever happen, faith keeps your heart beating in a cadence of “not yet.”  It will happen…  It will happen… It will happen… Just not yet…

I don’t know why God keeps us waiting.  In a world of instant gratification, of anything goes, it seems that when we walk in faith, we are transversing a desert while everyone else is on the highway.  When we put our trust in God, the world is quick to show us what it would do in our situations. 

Of course, we don’t know all God’s ways.  We can never understand why some things happen the way they do, why people hurt other people, why the enemy seems to have his way in our lives.  All I know, is that God has a plan.  He turns people and circumstances around in ways that are miraculous, one tiny step at the time.  I think we often wait for the clap of thunder to announce His movement, when He is in the whisper.  He is in the things that seem insignificant, and perhaps completely unnoticed.

He’s always at work. 

I know that the season is long.  I know that you grow weary of standing.  I know that your heart has a burden that you silently lug around wherever you go because it never leaves you.  I know only too well…

I wonder how many years Abraham and Sarah waited for Isaac to be born?  Or how long Ruth stood in honoring Naomi, in doing what was right, before Boaz came into her life?  

In everything we do, we are moving closer and closer to seeing what we have been believing for come to pass.  It’s in how we do it, that matters.  It’s in keeping our hearts open to seeing what He is doing in the little things, in staying obedient to His ways, in keeping our eyes on Him no matter what it looks like.

God does hear us.  He knows what we are going through.  He is working all things out for our good, even if it is working out differently than we hoped.  

If you are in a place of waiting, keep trusting Him. Keep standing.  Keep believing. Even when you can’t see the evidence, the answer is not “no.”  It’s just “not yet.”  And sometimes, it’s because what He is doing is even better than what we have been praying for.

Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work with in us, to Him be the glory.  Ephesians 3:20

Your waiting is never in vain.  Keep the faith.  There is a cloud, and soon it will rain and bring with it what your heart is yearning for.  

Just wait and see.