Am I Waiting On The Lord. . .Or Just Waiting?

Any time that a difficult season of life lasts for any length of time – and I mean from the day after the season starts to maybe years later – it feels like you’re waiting.  Waiting for answers.  Waiting for healing.  Waiting for God to open doors.  Waiting for God to provide. 

Sometimes you can do things about the circumstances you are in.  And sometimes you can’t.  Sometimes you do everything you know to do – go to the doctor, put job applications in, ask for prayer – and still your best efforts have left you without answers or direction and you find yourself waiting again.

One day, the Lord brought this verse back to my mind:

“But those who wait upon God get fresh strength.  They spread their wings and soar like eagles, they run and don’t get tired, they walk and don’t lag behind.”  Isaiah 40:31

I can tell you what – there are times when I’m waiting that I don’t feel like I have strength at all, let alone fresh strength.

And then the Lord said to me, “There’s a difference between waiting on the Lord. . .and just waiting.”

Hmm.

When I’m just waiting, hoping for the next phone call, open door or long-awaited deliverance from my situation, I’m just wasting time.  I’m in survival mode, just getting through the day.  My thoughts tend to focus on my fears of the future and my actions often betray the angst of my soul.  I may desperately borrow from Peter to pay Paul for fear of not having enough.  I may resort to human answers when I feel like divine answers are lacking.  I may rush ahead through what looks like an open door, only to find that it was a dead end of my own making.  And I never feel fresh strength with that kind of waiting.  I feel tired, overwhelmed, fearful and doubting.

If you read a few verses earlier in Isaiah 40, God speaks to this kind of waiting, too:

“So—who is like me?  Who holds a candle to me?” says The Holy. Look at the night skies:  Who do you think made all this?  Who marches this army of stars out each night, counts them off, calls each by name—so magnificent! so powerful!—and never overlooks a single one?

Why would you ever complain, O Jacob, or, whine, Israel, saying, “God has lost track of me. He doesn’t care what happens to me”?  Don’t you know anything? Haven’t you been listening?  God doesn’t come and go. God lasts. He’s Creator of all you can see or imagine.  He doesn’t get tired out, doesn’t pause to catch his breath.  And he knows everything, inside and out.  He energizes those who get tired, gives fresh strength to dropouts.  For even young people tire and drop out, young folk in their prime stumble and fall.” Isaiah 40:25-30

Reading that gives me a different perspective on the fresh strength God wants to give us as we wait on Him. 

When we wait on Him, our hope and expectation is in our mighty God.  God sees all – and He sees us!  He sees our desperation, our anxious hearts, our difficult situations.  We don’t serve a distant God.  He is all powerful, the God of the universe – a universe that obeys His every word.  Nothing causes Him to grow weary and not even the youngest and strongest of men can compare to His all-encompassing greatness and strength.  And He offers all of that strength, care and wisdom to us. . .

-if we wait on Him instead of just waiting

-if we choose to trust and believe that if He’s allowing us to 
 walk this path, He’s got it under His control

-if we get our strength from Him instead of trying to control
 everything in our own strength

I want to share a very practical example of this in our own lives.  A few years ago, the clutch went out on our car.  It happened close to where Craig was working at that time, but not at all close to our house.  A friend volunteered to let us use their AAA membership to get the car towed.  And when we got the car to the nearest mechanic, they said it would cost us $1200 to be repaired.  Now, I don’t know about you, but we didn’t have and extra $1200 laying around.

We knew the easy response would be to put it on a credit card.  But we also knew that we didn’t want to do that.  We didn’t just want to act with what seemed to be a reasonable, human response.  So we decided to wait on God.  We would ask Him to provide.

Now I will tell you, that felt like a crazy time.  We, thankfully, have two cars, so we were making do with carpooling and help from friends.  We were praying each and every day that God would provide $1200.  Close to a week goes by and the mechanic calls us to tell us the car is ready.  And we still don’t have the money. 

The days continue to go by and we’re still praying.  Our repaired car has now been sitting at the mechanic's for a week.  It would have been so easy to freak out.  It would have been easy to act out of our own understanding.  But we knew that God was challenging us to trust Him.  To allow Him to provide for us.  We chose to align our hearts to the truth of the Word instead of choosing to panic.  We chose to rest in Him, allow Him to work, wait on Him.

Our faith was being stretched as we waited on God. . .but it was also being strengthened.  He was giving us strength to trust His provision.  He had already planned a redemptive outcome - we just couldn’t see yet.

I remember the moment when it all came together.  I was sitting at my desk, our car still having sat fixed at the mechanics for over a week.  I was looking at the calendar, and realized that we were in a 5-week month.  Craig got paid every other Friday, and the ways the paydays happened to fall, we were going to get 3 pay checks that month!!  We would have the $1200!!  I literally jumped up from my desk, screaming with excitement!  God had provided for us while we waited on Him.

How many times have we missed the blessings and provision that God has for us because we don’t wait on Him?  How many times have we missed walking in His strength and power because we rely on our own? 

I don’t want to merely wait and then walk in my limited human wisdom.  As we wait on the Lord, we DO get fresh strength for the journey!