4 Strategies to Help You Wait Better
Hopeful Waiting
I’m sure you’d like to move from anxiety to faith-filled, hopeful waiting. How do we make this practical? Let me give you a fourfold strategy from Psalm 25.
First, imagine an uncomfortable or stressful situation where you’re not in control. Try to recollect a recent scenario to make it more vivid and personal. It’s probably not hard to find a few examples. Ask yourself what dynamics are in play, what thoughts flood your mind, what fears are surfacing, and what you want. Just to be clear, I’m not assuming that every answer to the previous questions is bad or sinful. Often the things we desire are good, and we might have an understandable reason to be concerned. Our struggle with waiting isn’t implicitly sinful. It can be, but it depends on what we do next. I've identified that when my desire for control gets the best of me, I frequently turn to three unhelpful and sinful responses: anger, anxiety, and apathy. What’s the solution?
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.
Focus. Adore. Seek. Trust.
I’m not a huge fan of acronyms. Sometimes they seem forced. But I’m going to break my own rule, because when waiting becomes disorienting, you need a memorable path out of the fog. When your thinking is off and the internal tension is rising, I hope you’ll remember to wait FAST: focus, adore, seek, and trust. This process is a distillation of four principles from Psalm 25.
1. Focus
The first step is changing our focus. Uncertainty or scenarios where we’re not in control tend to take over our thoughts and emotions. It sounds like this:
-
“What’s going on? Why is this taking so long?”
-
“I haven’t heard anything yet. It must mean . . . ”
-
“I’m getting nervous. I need to start taking some steps.”
-
“What have I done wrong that I can’t get an answer?”
-
“Is God really listening to me?”
When you’re in this frame of mind, it’s easy to be singularly focused on what you don’t know or what you don’t have. It can occupy a lot of energy.
The first step is recognizing this pattern and turning it into a spiritual opportunity. Instead of living with a “gap-centered” mindset, you can choose to live with a God-centered perspective. In this way, the loss of control becomes a means of spiritual growth. But it starts with changing your focus.
We see this intentional shift in Psalm 25:1–3. The context of the psalm appears to be some kind of conflict with people. David describes himself as lonely, afflicted, troubled, and distressed (Ps. 25:16–17). So it must have been intense. But the psalm begins with hopeful purpose:
To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in you I trust;
let me not be put to shame;
let not my enemies exult over me.
Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame. (Ps. 25:1–3a)
Rather than wasting his waiting by being angry or anxious, David directs his focus to the Lord. A biblical understanding of waiting invites us to see it as receiving from the Lord or to look to him.
This first step may be the hardest since the emotional power of the “gap moment” is strong. But if we can intentionally make this shift, there’s a lot of hope. Andrew Murray compares it to moving into the sunshine:
Come, and however feeble you feel, just wait in His presence. As a feeble, sickly invalid is brought out into the sunshine to let its warmth go through him, come with all that is dark and cold in you into the sunshine of God’s holy, omnipotent love, and sit and wait there, with the one thought: Here I am, in the sunshine of His love. As the sun does its work in the weak one who seeks its rays, God will do His work in you.1
Change your focus. Don’t live by what you don’t know about your life. Embrace this truth instead: “None who wait for you shall be put to shame” (Ps. 25:3).
2. Adore
The second step is to worshipfully rehearse what you know to be true about God. Waiting chooses to focus on what I know about the Lord instead of panicking in uncertainty. This step intentionally fills the gaps of life with the glory of God as we think about him.
Reframe your internal question from “What’s missing?” to “What’s true about God?”
In Psalm 25:5 we see this worshipful posture: “For you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.” This is more than a statement of facts. David links waiting and worship. He’s filling the gaps of life with adoration.
During a season when I was spiritually and emotionally exhausted from so much waiting, I put this into practice by memorizing Psalm 27:1: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” Rather than focusing on the words “fear” and “afraid,” I emphasized who the Lord is. Sometimes I’d even say the word “is” with greater emphasis to make the point stronger in my soul: “The Lord IS my light. . . . The Lord IS the stronghold of my life.” Since glory is connected to weightiness, I imagined the truth of God taking up all the space in my gap moment.
Filling my waiting with who God is proved to be transforming.
Psalms 25 and Psalm 27, however, are just the start. I found it helpful to meditate on and rehearse other verses. In the appendix you’ll find two lists of verses: “The Lord Is . . . ” and “Lord, You Are . . . .” Use these lists as a way to fill up your waiting with worship. Biblical waiting intentionally fills the gaps of life with adoration.
Biblical waiting is active; it seeks the Lord.
3. Seek
The third step involves inviting and requesting God’s help. It’s another step in making waiting something active. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that waiting means we are doing nothing. However, biblical waiting means that I’m seeking God’s help in a new and even desperate way.
We see numerous purposeful requests for divine deliverance in Psalm 25. Here are just a few:
-
Turn to me and be gracious to me. (Ps. 25:16)
-
Bring me out of my distresses. (Ps. 25:17)
-
Consider my affliction and my trouble. (Ps. 25:18)
-
Guard my soul. (Ps. 25:20)
-
Deliver me! (Ps. 25:20)
That’s a lot of requests! And that’s what we do when we wait. We’re not in control, so we talk to the one who is. We don’t know, so we seek the one who does. Eugene Peterson says this:
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.2
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that waiting means you are doing nothing. Usually it just means that you’re not doing what you want to do.
Biblical waiting is active; it seeks the Lord.
4. Trust
The final step is embracing by faith the contentment and spiritual rest that come from knowing God can be trusted. This is where focusing, adoring, and seeking lead us. Waiting involves affirming what we know and learning to live on it. That doesn’t mean all our questions will be answered. Nor does it mean the waiting will be over soon.
At the end of Psalm 25 it’s clear that David is still in the middle of uncertainty. There’s remaining fear in the air. But he chooses to wait on God.
Consider how many are my foes,
and with what violent hatred they hate me.
Oh, guard my soul, and deliver me!
Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.
May integrity and uprightness preserve me,
for I wait for you.
Redeem Israel,
O God, out of all his troubles. (Ps. 25:19–22)
This hopeful, trusting posture is expressed in Psalm 27 as well:
I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living!
Wait for the Lord; be strong,
and let your heart take courage;
wait for the Lord!” (Ps. 27:13–14)
Waiting embraces God as a refuge while the answers are not clear and may never be.
What’s your strategy when you have to wait? Instead of allowing strong emotions to overtake you, use FAST as a framework to turn waiting into a spiritual opportunity. I’ve seen firsthand the practical benefits of engaging my mind and heart in this way. When a gap moment emerges, and I feel the rising tide of worry, it’s been helpful to shift FAST—to focus, adore, seek, and trust. I’m learning to battle anxiety and frustration with this biblical strategy. The next time you face uncertainty, delays, or a sense of powerlessness, I hope you’ll start to embrace waiting by reminding yourself what you know to be true about God when you don’t know what’s true about your life.
Waiting requires living thoughtfully. While we acknowledge our uncertainty and the challenges of the moment, we can reorient our thinking. In so doing, we can maximize our waiting instead of wasting it. Andrew Murray offers this helpful summary:
You are not going to wait on yourself to see what you feel and what changes come to you. You are going to wait on God, to know first, what He is, and then, after that, what He will do.3
Notes:
- Andrew Murray, Waiting on God! Daily Messages for a Month (New York: Revell, 1896).
- Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, commemorative ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 138.
- Murray, Waiting on God!, 47–48.
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
11 Passages to Read to Help Fight Worry
Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Read these passages to help fight the sin of worry.
We are encouraged not to fear, but trust in the Lord with all our hearts, leaning not on our strength and understanding, but on his.
The Crushing Freedom of Decision-Making
One of the unanticipated weights of living in an age of unprecedented freedom is the anxiety that comes as its counterpart.
Podcast: Help! My Christian Life Is a Mess (Lewis & Sarah Allen)
Lewis and Sarah Allen talk about the painful trials and unexpected disappointments in our lives as Christians and what we should do when our faith feels weak or our walk with Christ feels like a mess.
