While you may never love to wait, you can transform gap moments into an opportunity for spiritual growth. Rather than wasting your waiting, you can worship your way through it.
Wait for the Lord
Do you know anyone who likes to wait? I don’t.
If you were to take a quick survey, there’d be a strong consensus that waiting is difficult, annoying, or downright bad. Waiting should be avoided and not affirmed, right? Everyone knows that!
This universal perspective is made worse by our fast-paced culture. Waiting less is either a status symbol or a marker of good customer service. At Disney World, you can purchase a special pass to avoid the long lines. By enrolling in TSA PreCheck, you avoid the hassle of waiting in long screening lines. Fast food restaurants reward their employees for shortening wait times in the drive-thru. With a click of a button and an Amazon Prime membership, your package can be on your doorstep in a day or two.
Waiting less or not waiting at all is increasingly normal and celebrated.
However, life is still full of waiting. Despite our desire to eliminate it, there are lots of gap moments. There are many people waiting for medical test results, a job offer, a home to sell, a college acceptance, reconciliation with a loved one, a spouse, a child, an adoption, or the passing of a family member in hospice care. A quick survey of your life would reveal a lot of waiting. To be human is to wait.
How Not to Wait
I would guess that those seasons of waiting were not only hard, but they probably didn’t go very well. That’s certainly been the case with me.
My track record with waiting involves a lot of reluctance and impatience. I don’t want to wait, and I have a bias against it—like it’s something bad. What’s more, when I do I have to wait, I want it to be over as soon as possible. Waiting should be avoided and reduced, right?
When my disdain for waiting gets the best of me, I tend to fall into three unhelpful responses. Each are connected to a desire for control. Anger—doing something rash to end the waiting. Anxiety—trying to think my way out of a delay. Apathy—protecting myself from disappointment with not caring.
The result? Instead of seeing a gap as an opportunity, I see it as annoying, frustrating, or threatening. I waste my waiting.
How Should You Wait?
In this struggle with waiting, we find this command in Psalm 27:14: “Wait for the Lord, be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”
That’s not the only place waiting on the Lord is commanded or commended. There are lots of verses that celebrate it (e.g., Ps. 25:3, 31:24, 40:1, 62:1, 130:5). “Gap moments” are opportunities for Christians to reaffirm trust in God, to rest in him, and live by faith. But for many of us, that’s not how we see or feel about waiting.