Psalm 30:5 tells us that joy comes in the morning. Do you know that verse? But my weeping didn’t last for only one night. It seemed to last for days on end. All I wanted was an answer to my many prayers. Sometimes joy doesn’t come in the morning. Nor at the end of the week. The month. And we must wait. But waiting is hard, even excruciating. It’s challenging to navigate. Waiting often feels like being trapped, with no way through or out and no light at the end.
Though it may seem like that, it isn’t the reality. Yes, it gets hard and you get weary from all the mental, physical, and emotional fights. However I’m confident in saying that God is working there in the murky waters. In the darkness. Is hoping during the wait hard? Absolutely. Yet by God’s grace and with his help we can keep hope alive.
The God who stands with you in your waiting is also the one who stands behind it.
The thing about waiting is that you need to remember who’s ultimately in control. You must remind yourself of God’s power and character. He’s numbered all my days. His promise-keeping record is immaculate. But trusting him is a lifelong school, learning to hold onto his promises and rest in his sovereignty. We don’t always act like that’s true. I don’t. Thus I must drench myself in his word, reading about who he has proven himself to be. In the words of Chinua Achebe, the world regularly feels like it’s “falling apart.” Only God has not. He’s steadfast. He hasn’t lost control. Significantly, the one who stands with you in your waiting is also the one who stands behind it. So turn to him.
Check Yourself
Recently I have learned that while waiting I need to keep checking that my significance, security, and satisfaction are not in the things I am waiting for, but in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is so easy for me to have a wandering heart and eyes while waiting. But I have to constantly, like the author of Hebrews says, fix my eyes on Jesus if I expect to endure. “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder, and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1-2).
I need to keep checking that my security and satisfaction are not in the things I am waiting for.
Waiting presents us with a decision. Do I look to God? Do I look to “the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 40:28)? For “He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but 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” (Isaiah 40:29-31).
Remind Yourself
Next, I have had to learn to talk to myself. Do you know why you need to learn to talk to yourself? Because you are the person that spends the most time with yourself. It’s in these times when despair and stress seem to be swallowing you whole that you must interrogate your own heart: “Why are you downcast. O my soul?” (Psalm 42:11). Then remind yourself, as another psalmist did: “I lift my eyes up to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1-2).
We flounder when we forget to look to the God who readily helps us in our time of trouble.
Write those verses out. Memorise them. Pin them up on the walls of your home. Use a magnet to stick them to the fridge. We flounder when we forget to look to the God who readily helps us in our time of trouble. Despair follows hotly on the heels of forgetfulness. Talk to yourself. For it’s easy to become hopeless, tossed about by any and every wind, when God isn’t our anchor for the storm.
Count Your Blessings
Whenever I’m going through a tough season in my life, I seem to be blinded against seeing all the other things God has done and is doing in my life. I once heard that life is not a series of hills and valleys, like many of us have been taught; it is more like a train track where you have two rails running simultaneously together side by side. At any given time in your life, there are bad things that could be happening. But there is also so much good that God is doing and has done that you ought to be grateful for.
This has brought me great peace in my waiting, to be thankful for the many things God has already done.
So, friend, count your blessings, while you wait on the Lord. It has brought me great peace in my waiting, to be thankful for the many things God has graciously done. This moves me to trust in him for my future. It helps me to sing with the psalmist, “joy comes in the morning.” That verse has two senses. Firstly, tomorrow is another opportunity to find my joy in God, to trust in him. Secondly, the future is brighter than any human hopes, because it is ensured by God himself.
Look to Your Saviour
Well, I am just here to tell you to wait on the Lord. We have many reasons to trust in God. But perhaps none of them is more crystal clear than the cross. There God gave his only Son, for me. He did this so I might live. So that even as I wait I can be fully assured of a future with him. A future free of uncertainty and suffering. So wait with quiet confidence.
Wait with quiet confidence.
There’s a song in my local language where the songstress asks: Calendar yawe noha ogyiine? It means, ‘Who has your calendar?’ Then she answers, Ni Yesu, meaning ‘It’s Jesus.’ There it is. If you truly believe that God has supernaturally ordained your days on this earth before you were even born, then you can trust him to take you home when the time comes. Wait on the Lord.
