The Waiting Game

Sometimes life feels like a giant waiting game.

You know what I mean?

Waiting for that relationship. Waiting for the pain to pass. Waiting for classes to get easier, for friendship drama to cease. Waiting to feel God’s Presence and for time with Him to come easily. Waiting for all of our dreams to come true. Waiting…waiting…waiting…

Does it ever stop? Do we ever just see God provide right when we ask for something?

Maybe, but not very often. And in the last couple of weeks I’ve learned what a beautiful thing that is when we learn to be grateful for it. In our American culture, being patient is perhaps the hardest thing for us (maybe it’s just me). We’re given everything whenever we want it. So often life is spoon fed to us and when we have to wait. And be still. It’s torture.

But this week God has really been revealing to me this thing called faith…and what it really means to have faith in Him.

I just added a Global Studies minor to my Elementary Education degree (so excited by the way), and in my Global Studies class we’ve been looking at faith in the Old Testament.

My professor revealed to us that in Scripture when the Bible was originally translated from Greek, the word for faith wasn’t a noun. It was a verb.

I don’t know if you caught the meaning of that, so I’ll say it again.

Faith is a verb. It’s an action. A continual movement towards a goal, fighting for what we believe in, seeking after what we know to be true.

Professor Harper (my Global Studies professor who is a fountain of wisdom) used Abraham as an example (this is where waiting and faith tie in together so beautifully). In Hebrews 11 we read the following:

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going…By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’ He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”

There is so much to unpack in those four verses, but let me just say this: Abraham went out from his homeland – he left his family and the only place he had ever known – and sought after what God was calling him to do. And he didn’t even know where God was taking him! He trusted God to the point that he was willing to sacrifice his only son – through which every nation on earth was supposed to be blessed – because it’s what God was telling him to do.

And how did Abraham do all of this? By faith.

Now, if you know anything about the Bible, you know that Abraham had waited nearly a hundred years for the birth of his miracle son, Isaac.

He had waited. 100 years.

In the middle of those 100 years, God called him to a new land. God told him that He was going to bless the nations through the offspring of his family (which he didn’t even have at that point). In the midst of Abraham’s waiting, God spoke the first words of a promise that would change the course of history. And we think this waiting game is a waste of time.

When I look at stories like Abraham’s, I am reminded that in the middle of our waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promises (and the things we want/think we need), we are still called to active faith.

Being active in our faith doesn’t involve being stagnant. It calls us to go where God calls us, even if we don’t know where the location is. It calls us to reach out to that girl across the street (or down the hall) who seems lonely. It calls us to make disciples in every situation.

Acting in faith calls us to pursue the God who has spoken promises into our lives with the very mouth that He breathed the stars, to chase after Him and trust His will and His way above every other voice in this world.

Because in the waiting He will be moving and acting on your behalf and my behalf in ways that we could have never imagined. In our waiting we learn to trust Him and lean on Him in ways we never thought possible.

By faith (the very active verb) we can trust Him in the waiting, because He always keeps His promises. It’s who He is.

Just ask Abraham.