Replacing Resistance with Waiting
Nobody likes to wait. We’ve gotten to this point in our society where we are so accustomed to everything being instantaneous that even a short wait feels excruciating. I remember being a hostess at a restaurant while I was in college; people would be irate if I told them the wait was 10 to 15 minutes! We want what we want now and if we’re told to wait, we cannot possibly fathom why we should have to.
When faced with a wait, our instinct is to rebel, to resist. We look for ways to shorten the wait, to get around the process to access what we want, to take matters into our own hands so we don’t have to endure what we deem to be impossible. It’s the little kid who climbs on the kitchen counter to try to get a bowl down for cereal because mom is taking too long to do it like she promised- inevitably what we’re trying to do to circumvent our situation comes crashing down around us, shattered to pieces, and we’ve made a bigger mess of things than what we started with. It all could have been avoided if we’d just waited.
I’ve never been good at waiting, which is probably why God has called me into seasons of waiting for pretty much my entire life. Some of my waits have been typical rights of passage, like high school and college graduation. But some of the things God has called me to wait for were things He blessed others with without much fuss: my job, my husband, and now my first child. I saw people around me starting dream careers fresh out of undergrad; I had to take a long path through a second degree and lots of let downs in my job search before I ended up teaching at my alma mater high school. I saw people I graduated from college with marry their college sweethearts mere months after graduation; I trampled through the dating pool for years and years, kissing lots of frogs along the way, before I met Justin. I saw people who got married after I did get pregnant with first and even second babies just by looking at their spouse; I battled infertility and pregnancy loss for almost three years before I became pregnant through IVF with my rainbow baby. In each of these waits, early on I did what was natural to human flesh: I resisted. I tried to force that square peg into a round hole and make something happen, only to end up with more heartbreak. And through it all, God just looked at me like a parent looks at a toddler: an exasperated smile on His face, wondering, “Will she ever learn?”
A few summers ago, when I was close to reaching another breaking point in our wait for a baby, I did something I should have done a decade ago: I sat down to dig into God’s Word and find out what He really says about waiting. I discovered two things: studying Scripture on my own is not as terrifying as I thought it would be, and God has A LOT to say about how to wait.
First of all, I had always been intimidated to study Scripture on my own. I was a dutiful Bible Study attendee, completing studies by Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer, Kelly Minter, and more. I did the homework in my study book, attended meetings to discuss with my group members, and took copious notes while watching the video teachings. And I still adore this method of studying Scripture; these women have led me down some roads in the Bible that have changed my life. But I had gotten to a place where this method of being in my Bible was a crutch. If I wasn’t working on a Bible Study, I wasn’t studying the Bible. And that is not how you grow deeper in your faith.
Thanks to a book called Mercy like Morning by Jane Johnson, I found a road map to developing personal Bible study habits that allowed me to access Scripture on a whole new level. I immediately set out my first plan: to do a word study of “wait.” I made a list of all the times “wait” shows up in Scripture, and discovered that the first occurrence was in 2 Kings. I expected there to be mentions of Sarah or Rachel waiting for those babies God promised in Genesis. And while the action of “laying in wait” for an enemy appears numerous times from Genesis to 2 Kings, the first time someone is waiting on something- specifically God- is in 2 Kings 6:33.
I stared at that Scripture reference and was petrified. How in the world was I going to study 2 Kings by myself?! This was not a place I ever ventured in my Bible, let alone without the guidance of a Bible teacher or pastor who was way smarter than me. But I did the only thing I could think of: prayed for God to allow the Holy Spirit to show me what I needed to hear and dove into the reading.
This verse is located in the middle of a story about Samaria being attacked by the Arameans. This brings on a famine that is so bad, people are eating their children to survive! The king goes into mourning over the devastation in his kingdom, and then seeks out the prophet Elisha, demanding, “This disaster is from the Lord. Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?” (2 Kings 6:33 NIV)
Does that hit anyone else the way it does me? The early years I spent struggling with pregnancy loss and infertility, I couldn’t help but think that what was happening to me was God’s fault. I looked at this in one of two ways: either He’s causing it, which just makes Him cruel and distant; or He’s allowing it, which makes Him seem too weak to stop it from happening. When this happens, we ask ourselves, why would we keep waiting for Him to rescue us? He’s clearly not coming to our aid. And that is when we resist His plan and try to rescue ourselves.
But Elisha has good news for the king: God promises that the following day, food will be so cheap! This seems unlikely, as things are an utter trainwreck at the moment- can it really 180 that fast? An officer of the king voices this doubt, and receives some bad news in return: because he has questioned God’s ability, he will get to see the promise fulfilled, but he won’t get to enjoy it himself.
And then God does what only He can do: He fulfills the promise in the most unexpected way possible. Four lepers who have left the city, believing that they’re going to die anyways, stumble upon the Arameans camp, which has now been abandoned. They start plundering the food and riches for themselves, but think better of it and return to the city to share the wealth with the kingdom. To make sure this isn't an ambush, some officers go to check out the scene, following the path of the Arameans to the Jordan River where they find all of their weaponry abandoned as well. When they return to the city with all of the goods, wealth among the people increases, causing the price of food to fall, just as God promised.
And that officer who doubted? As people are leaving the city to retrieve the goods from the Arameans’ camp, he sees proof of the promise fulfilled from the gates, but then is trampled to death before he can claim his own piece of the pie.
Resisting God’s plan can have disastrous consequences. The enemy can latch on to the tiniest foothold when he senses our doubt that God will come through. He will do whatever it takes to keep that hold on us so that we never fully experience God’s promises. We can’t give him even an inch or that flicker of doubt will turn into full-on resistance in a heartbeat.
When we look at the Hebrew word used in this story for “wait,” we get some guidance as to how we can actually do that. The Hebrew here is “yachal,” which means “to tarry, hope for, expect.” It’s verb form is causative, which for you non-English teachers means that the subject has to actually do something to cause this type of verb to happen. In other words, we have to make a conscious effort to cause this kind of waiting to happen in our lives! Most people hate to wait because they feel nothing is progressing in the wait, but this definition shows us that waiting is still active. It’s just a matter of perspective.
We have to have intentions of waiting on God. If we do, our wait is pleasing to Him and He will honor that in due course, as He did with the rescue of Samaria. If we do not commit to our waiting, like the king’s officer, we don’t get to fully experience God’s blessing at the end of the wait. And if we flat out refuse to wait on God? In 2 Samuel 18:14, Joab plunges three javelins into Absalom’s heart because he refuses to wait for his issues with Absalom to be resolved another way. His resistance to God’s plan for his situation allowed Satan to grab hold of his heart and he completely missed out on the blessings God would have brought if he had waited.
So how do we make sure we set our intentions on waiting for God? My word study unearthed a treasure trove of guidance, and I could write 50 more pages on all I learned. But the number one strategy I can offer you is found in Psalm 25:5: “Lead me in thy truth and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all day” (KJV). When I looked up the Hebrew for this verse, “qavah,” there was an interesting definition included: “to twist, to bind, to be strong, robust.” This verb describes the action of twisting or binding a rope together- a rope that is strong and robust, able to withstand immense pressure. If we want to set intentions to wait on God, we have to bind ourselves to Him, twist ourselves up with His Holy Spirit, so we are strong and robust enough to withstand the pressure that can come with waiting.
We have to seek God daily: Study His Word; speak AND listen to Him in prayer; worship Him through music, art, your job. Let Him become an active part of every aspect of your day and your life. The more you seek Him, the more you will feel His presence with you as you wait, and the stronger you will be to endure that wait, no matter how long it stretches on.
Our anxieties cause us to resist God’s plan. We try to jump ahead of Him, we try to solve the problem ourselves so we can get what we’re after. When we replace resistance with waiting we recapture our joy; we release control of the plan back into God’s hands so that we can wait expectly for Him to follow through on His promise- He has before and He will again.
Pregnancy and motherhood after loss and infertility don’t mean the wait is over- it just means that we’re waiting on something new. We’re waiting for that next appointment, for the doctor to tell us everything looks healthy. We’re waiting for our precious rainbow baby to be born into this world. We’re waiting for the season of sleepless nights, endless diaper changes, or temper tantrums to subside. It doesn’t change our instinct to resist the plan, even if that plan is deeply ingrained in the biology that God created in us as women! In all of these seasons of waiting, I seek to bind myself to my Father who rewards the wait in unexpected ways. I pray that you will join me.
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