3 Steps to Take If You’ve Been Waiting on God
Cultivating Patience
If you are walking through a season that is leading you to feel frustrated, anxious, or impatient, here are some steps that can help.
1. Name Your Expectations
Part of the challenge with our expectations is that we often don’t realize we have them. They can exist simply as an accepted reality without ever being challenged. Expectations can remain in the background while exerting significant emotional influence on us because they are often connected to hopes, desires, and dreams.
Naming your expectations is the practice of simply bringing to the surface what you are thinking and feeling. For example, it might sound like, “I expected to be married by forty,” or, “I thought I would have heard from my boss in three weeks,” or, “I hoped that we’d be parents after five years of trying to conceive,” or, “I can’t believe it’s taking a week to get the test results back.” This step helps by acknowledging the disappointment and specifically identifying the length of time we anticipated.
I’ve found this to be helpful, because it takes something inherently emotional and provides a way of looking at it rationally. Sometimes the length of time I’ve been waiting is unusually or surprisingly long. However, it’s also true that my disappointment makes the waiting feel longer or more unusual than it should. Impatience and expectations tend to be unhelpful collaborators. In fact, if you look back to the examples I listed in the previous paragraph, take note of the verbs: expected, thought, hoped, and believe.
Waiting Isn't a Waste
Mark Vroegop
In Waiting Isn’t a Waste, author Mark Vroegop explores 6 characteristics of waiting, calling believers to lean on Christ when we are uncertain about our lives, but certain about God.
The most obvious way to apply this is when you are struggling with waiting. But I’ve also found it helpful to name my expectations before a potential waiting opportunity. It could sound like this: “I’m expecting this to be resolved by _,” or, “I’m assuming I’ll have an answer in _,” or, “I think there will be clarity by _.” Identifying my expectations in advance provides an opportunity for me to evaluate if they are reasonable, and it serves as a reminder about the need to prepare for waiting.
Naming our expectations empowers us to face and commit them to the Lord.
2. Embrace the Tension
The second suggestion involves changing your attitude or perspective about the tension that waiting creates. Hopefully you’re starting to sense a shift in how you think about waiting as you’ve read this book so far. I’ve suggested that most of us have an inherently negative view of waiting. But when you begin to see the spiritual opportunity, that can begin to change.
Patience is created as we value what God is doing in our life through the tension.
This is where mapping God’s historical faithfulness is particularly helpful. By memorializing the past, we can observe how seasons of waiting were used by God for our development and growth. No doubt these times were challenging, and they may have felt pointless in the moment, but with the benefit of time we can chart the spiritual benefits. The prophet Jeremiah wrote the following in Lamentations 3:
The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth. (Lam. 3:25–27)
This may be why impatience is often associated with younger people. They usually do not have the life experience to demonstrate the value of waiting. Experience is a good teacher.
Therefore, one of the key steps in cultivating patience is embracing the tension as something good and helpful even though it’s uncomfortable. This is easy to miss because our disappointment can overrule. C. S. Lewis says, “It seems to me that we often, sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at the moment, we expected some other good.”1 I’ve found it useful to remind myself of this reality by praying the following:
Lord, remind me that you are working while I’m waiting.
Jesus, I’m trusting that this tension is creating long-lasting fruit in my life.
Father, I’m releasing my right to know when this is going to end.
God, I’m believing that in waiting there’s a promise of strength.
In Psalm 40, embracing the tension sounds like this: “I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me” (Ps. 40:17). Patience is formed by embracing the tension of waiting.
Lord, remind me that you are working while I’m waiting.
3. Practice Daily Waiting
You may be in a challenging season right now. I hope that you might shift your perspective from what you don’t know about your life to what you know to be true about God.
However, this final step seeks to create a regular rhythm that cultivates patience before it’s desperately needed. I’ve found there’s a direct relationship between this step and success in waiting because it orients my heart to a position of being “waiting ready” or “waiting aware.” Andrew Murray describes it this way:
Our private and public prayer are our chief expression of our relation to God: it is in them chiefly that our waiting upon God must be exercised. . . . Bow quietly before God, just to remember and realize who He is, how near He is, how certainly He can and will help. Just be still before Him and allow His Holy Spirit to waken and stir up in your soul the child-like disposition of absolute dependence and confident expectation. Wait upon God as a Living Being, as the Living God, who notices you, and is just longing to fill you with His salvation.2
In my spiritual history, I was taught to have a “quiet time.” This usually involved a time for devotional reading, journaling, and the prayer form of ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication). I’m thankful for this basic spiritual discipline because it’s proven beneficial to my soul. But I also found it helpful to shift my quiet time to “waiting time,” the daily cultivation of patience by waiting on the Lord. Below is an overview of how I apply FAST (focus, adore, seek, and trust).
Focus
- Find a quiet place where I can pray and reflect without distraction.
- Light a candle as a reminder that God is with me.
- Spend a few minutes in silent reflection, focusing my mind and slowing down my heart to embrace the importance of this moment.
Adore
- Slowly read or recite a few verses from the “Lord Is . . . ” or “Lord, You Are . . . ” list.
- Prayerfully meditate on what is true about God and praise him for who he is.
- Meditatively read a psalm and look for statements that can become a means of worship.
Seek
- Devotionally read a passage of Scripture, looking for promises to claim and allowing the Spirit to use the word to speak to me.
- Prayerfully review the day ahead, anticipating the ways I will need to wait on the Lord.
Trust
- Affirm my need for the Lord’s help with the issues I’m wrestling with.
- Conclude by expressing hopeful trust in God: “You are going to help me.”
This practice could be brief and just a few minutes. Sometimes I linger in God’s presence, allowing the assurance of his help to wash over me, calm my anxiety, and bring rest to my soul. On other occasions, I find a prayer walk to be a helpful venue to shift my focus. By engaging my body, it’s remarkable how I’m able to slow down, focus my prayers, and intentionally meditate. Hurry and worry tend to go together in me. Another practice is locational. There’s a large park near my home, and it’s a sacred space for me. The Lord and I have talked about a lot on the winding trails of the dense woods. There’s something about this place and its personal history that create a natural motivation to wait on God. Sometimes it feels like I have more air in my lungs as I drive into this beautiful park. My soul seems at rest.
As you think about steps that you could take, consider building on the spiritual disciplines that minister to your soul. Perhaps you could add a few minutes to your prayer time, connecting to what you know to be true about God. Pull out your calendar and commit your activities to the Lord, praying about situations in which you’ll need to wait on him. Memorize a few verses or “God is . . . ” statements so that you have them available when fear or anxiety strikes. Find your sacred space and schedule some uninterrupted time to wait on the Lord.
This intentional shift from quiet time to waiting time has helped me embrace patient waiting as a lifestyle, not merely as a response to difficult situations. This daily practice resets my expectations that often make waiting harder.
Making time for intentional waiting creates a deeper reservoir of patience.
I’ve come to see the connection between my impatience and what I thought my life would look like. By redefining patience, addressing my expectations, and embracing the tension, I’ve experienced the strength promised in Isaiah:
They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint. (Isa. 40:31)
The more I’ve explored this cultivated patience, the more freedom I’ve discovered. Waiting is still hard, but this strategy has proven helpful.
I waited and waited and waited on the Lord. It’s often not what I expected, but it’s good.
Notes:
- C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer, (San Diego: Harcourt, 1992), 25.
- Andrew Murray, Waiting on God! Daily Messages for a Month (New York: Revell, 1896), 24, 31.
This article is adapted from Waiting Isn’t a Waste: The Surprising Comfort of Trusting God in the Uncertainties of Life by Mark Vroegop.
Related Articles
3 Pitfalls to Avoid While You’re Waiting on God
Life involves a lot of waiting. For most of us, that usually doesn’t go very well. If we’re honest, waiting pushes our buttons.
Waiting on the Lord Is Not a Waste
You’re not doing anything, but God is. Waiting is one of the greatest applications of the Christian faith.
God’s People Are a Waiting People
As early as Eden, God’s people have been a waiting people. Following the fall of our first parents, God made a promise that permanently oriented his people toward the future.
Podcast: Don’t Waste Your Waiting (Mark Vroegop)
Mark Vroegop offers his thoughts on the difficult yet important question of what it looks like to wait well as a Christian.
