When the Answer Is “Wait”

We can make our peace with a "yes." We can even, in time, make our peace with a "no." It is the "not yet" that undoes us — the long, unlit corridor between the prayer we prayed and the promise we are still holding.

I have stood in that corridor more times than I can count. And I have learned that waiting is rarely God ignoring us. More often it is the place he is doing his deepest, quietest work — not only on the thing we asked for, but on the person doing the asking.

Waiting is not wasted time. It is the room where faith is built.

Think of how much is grown in the waiting that could be grown nowhere else. Patience, which only delay can teach. Trust, which only uncertainty can deepen. A loosened grip on our own timeline, which only an unanswered prayer can pry open.

So if you are waiting tonight, hear this gently: you have not been forgotten. The silence is not absence. The God who numbered the stars has not lost track of your one small request. Be strong, and take heart, and wait — not as one who has given up, but as one who knows the answer is already on its way.

“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”