Anyone who tells you that they enjoy waiting* is a liar. God spoke to me some years back, enjoining me to admit to Him the deepest desires of my heart. He has spent years confirming and reconfirming specific promises to fulfill them. He has shaped them over that time so that they are a desire-to-work, not a desire-to-have, and they grow sharper day by day.

The variety of Christian advice that one gets in these situations has gotten rather trite.

• “Just step forward and start doing, God will provide!” – I can’t. I require God’s provision to start. It is literally impossible to move forward without His blessing. Next?
• “Pray for patience!” I did that some decades back. Ask your mature Christian friends what happens when you ask for patience. God has developed patience in me that I could never have expected, but patience is not the same thing as enjoying (or not noticing) a wait.
• “Have faith!” Also yes. This has been one of the greatest progressions over the years**, my faith (which one might have expected to weaken) has grown much stronger and more deeply rooted. This is one of the things I give the most thanks for.***
• “Did God really say…” This doesn’t tend to come from Christians, but it is definitely the voice of the accuser in my ear – and it shows up repeatedly. God has been mindblowingly faithful in reconfirming the promises He has made. Thank God for that.

The advice is weak because we just don’t know what to do with hard things. American culture – if you don’t get it immediately, what’s wrong with you? Go out and self-actualize. Sitting in hard places (and admitting that they’re hard) is culturally unacceptable. These cultural tendencies have gotten mixed in with our religion, and that’s a problem.

The Inspirational People that come across the Christian cultural milieu (our modern day, Protestant “saints”, as t’were) get used for this weird cultural mess all the time. They’ll say, “this hard thing that happened caused me to go through the valley of the shadow of death, but God brought me through and I’m on the other side and I praise Him”. We hear, “this hard thing happened to me, and it’s much harder than anything that has ever happened to you, so you need to immediately smile and rejoice. No sitting in the hard first. No tears. Straight to rejoicing or you are a less-than Christian with weak faith”. Like the valley of the shadow of death is a resort property or something. Oii.

We try, for whatever reason, to jump to the reward without walking through the mess. When you get past a certain place in your walk of sanctification, you actually have to *walk through* the hard. On the other side, I have no doubt that even the worst pains will be transmuted into glories. That’s a God thing. We rejoice in our sufferings because we have faith in Him – but that rejoicing is a hard won mark of maturity, not a gimme.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that I’m enjoying the wait. I am not. It’s hard, and it includes tears, battles with despair, self-doubt, and frustration. It involves facing down fear and uncertainty, it involves self-examination – it even involves boredom, before I give myself yet another firm talking to and get back to making the most of the time. Waiting is not fun, I do not enjoy it, and I don’t want to do anything like this ever again. (May I, as dear pastor Mike used to say, learn my lessons the first time). If there be a perfect Christian woman, I am not her.

I wait on. I know that God’s timing is perfect, and when He comes through, everything is going to fall together and I will rejoice. I rejoice now, as I see Him change my character and grow me in ways I didn’t anticipate. But enjoy the wait? No.

Don’t let anyone lie to you – waiting sucks.

*for something that they really, truly, desire, without a timeline. Waiting at the dentist’s office is entirely another question.

** Yes, years. Yes, really. No, I haven’t kept track as I ought, because even writing it down at first was so tender. But years, plural, and more than a few.

*** I didn’t say waiting wasn’t useful. Just that it sucks. Lots of hard things make you stronger. They remain hard.