Wait.....

"And so, armed with our unintentionally asterisked waiting passages, we wait. 

We pray. 

We read more waiting passages. 

We pray some more. 

We try not to fidget. 

We delight in God. 

We delight in God some more. 

We humbly remind God that we are delighting in Him (teeth gritted, fists clenched, neck veins popping, but doggone it, if we were any more delighted, we'd have a heart attack). 

We alter our request to make it sound more spiritual, more like a prayer God would want to say yes to. 

We read more waiting passages. 

We get radical, and we fast. 

We ask friends to pray for us and fast with us. 

Time passes. 

Too much time. 

More time than we'd ever imagined. 

As faith fades, doubts bloom. 

We question God, the Bible, ourselves. 

The longer God's silence stretches, the more things start to break inside. 

I don't know what you are waiting for right now, but we all are waiting for something. 

If you're like me, you're waiting on several somethings. 

Sometimes The Thing we seek is not even a thing, but a feeling: peace, joy, relief, release, security, home. 

For many of us, waiting seasons are the first time our faith has been truly tested. 

They present risk and opportunity in equal measure, making us ask the hard faith questions, making us fight to find—and accept—the answers. 

Yes, No, Wait, and…Maybe 

You have probably heard some preacher say, "When you ask God for something, He gives one of three answers: Yes, no, or wait." 

It's a good point, a nice sermon illustration. 

It makes sense. 

But the problem is, yes is obvious. 

Yes means you get what you want. 

End of story, end of prayer request. 

Time to begin offering prayers of thanksgiving. 

Yes is wonderful. 

Yes is what we want every single time we ask God for something. 

Yes doesn't happen nearly as often, or as quickly, as we'd like. 

And then there's no: Sometimes no is just no. 

You want to marry so-and-so, but he marries someone else. 

End of story. 

Find another guy. 

But it's not always that clear-cut. 

The problem lies between the no and the wait. 

Because really, it's tough to tell the difference. 

Sometimes we think God's answer is no, but later—weeks, months, even decades later—the answer we thought was a no turns into a yes, so it turns out we actually had a "wait" all along."

Stay Strong!

:)