Be Still and Wait?
9.4.15
Recently I was having a conversation with a friend who was expressing feelings of restlessness in her life, feelings of uncertainty about what’s next and I could relate. As she was talking I could immediately remember this feeling myself. This season where you’re in a good place but you see God working somewhere else. You become aware that God is doing something over “there” and you begin to get excited about that place. You can sense that it’s going to be even better and in your excitement to get “there” you get restless in the place where you are.
During our conversation my friend asked a great question. “How do I pray through this season?”
My immediate response was to pray for patience. This was the first thing to my mind but it’s often a frustrating answer. In an effort to provide a little more encouragement I went to my journal to see exactly what God had spoken to me during these seasons in my life. I knew precisely where to go, it hadn’t been that long ago (read: get a journal and write in it!).
The verse I had written down was Psalms 37:4-7a
Take delight in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him and he will do this:
He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn,
your vindication like the noonday sun.
Be still before the Lord
and wait patiently for him;
Be Still AND Wait? At first these felt like the same thing but after breaking it down some I realized there is a key difference. When we rest we are motionless. We’re not planning or moving, there should be no action. But when we are waiting we should be in a constant state of expectancy. When you go to a restaurant you wait because you expect your table to be ready when they said it would. You arrive early to an airport and wait because you are expecting your plane to arrive.
Be Still AND Wait
God is saying "don't move, but be ready for me to". It's in this waiting period that we learn to wait for God to show up. We learn to trust him. We learn to hear his voice. I know that this place is hard. There are a lot of unanswered questions and you just want to get “there”.
Resting doesn’t come easy for most of us. It’s easy to feel like you won’t progress in life if you just sit still and wait. It’s easy to think that you’ll never get “there”, to the cool new thing God is doing if you don’t take action. But we're not just sitting still. Our spiritual life is still progressing. God is still moving us along a journey. He is taking us “there” spiritually before we can walk in it physically and that is the most important part. You don’t want to arrive and not be prepared. This waiting time is training time.
If you find yourself in a waiting time now I want to encourage you to embrace this season as an opportunity see God work in your life. Be expectant for God to show up. Waiting on the Lord in this season will allow you to see him work in supernatural ways and prepare you for so much more. Learn to love this season, you will find yourself here again and these lessons will serve you and others well down the road. Make sure you walk away with a testimony of God’s faithfulness when you arrive “there”.
