What We Discover During Times of Waiting

Over the past year, our family has found ourselves having to wait...really wait. We have all experienced waiting, but usually, there is some human way of manipulating the situation to speed things up. This manipulating is never a good thing and often places us outside of God’s will, but as people, we tend to feel in control when we have options during waiting periods. But there are times when we have no options and no way to manipulate the situation. There is nothing that can be done but wait! During these times of real waiting, God desires for us to turn our eyes upon Him with trust and allow Him to teach us.

Waiting periods teach us that God is constant and never changes. When the Corona pandemic grasped the world in the spring of 2020, we had just finished our deputation and had tickets in hand to fly to Kenya on March 18th. We were super excited that God was fulfilling His calling on our lives and finally taking us to Kenya! On the 15th of March, three days before we were to leave, we found out that Kenya had all but closed its borders and that we would not be able to fly. We were not devastated, but we were shocked. All of our preparations had been moving forward nicely. We had been so eager to leave, and now this news! It was difficult to wake up the next morning and see that God was still the same. The day before, we found identity in being missionaries bound for the field. But now it was hard to see that God was still in charge, but He was! God had still called us, and He was still going to take us to Kenya. We only had to wait for God’s time! We were the fickle ones; we were the ones who were tempted to doubt God’s faithfulness.

Waiting periods help us discover that God does not wait! God does not postpone His plans. Sometimes, it seems like He does. We could not leave for Kenya when we were supposed to leave, but were we supposed to leave then? Over the next few months, God taught us that we were not supposed to leave in March. The pandemic was not a surprise to God, our waiting was His plan all along, we just didn’t know it. God was not waiting for Kenya to open their borders, He had things for us to do in the States. When we boarded our flight to Kenya at the end of August, we knew without a doubt that it was the right time—the time that God had chosen for us to arrive on the field.

We cannot pretend to know all of the reasons why God allows us to face times of waiting, but we do know that He wants us to look to Him instead of our circumstances. He wants to be our focus. When we look to Him, we will find Him the same. We will find that His plan is sovereign. We will find ourselves as the Scriptures say, “waiting on the Lord” and not our circumstances.