Written by Sheryl Giesbrech, a contemporary author. This is an excerpt from her book “It’ll Be Okay: Finding God When Doubt Hides the Truth.”
“A soul cannot seek close fellowship with God, or attain the abiding consciousness of waiting on Him all the day, without a very honest and entire surrender to all His will” [Andrew Murray]. Most of us hate to wait. We can access technology to avoid waiting; we can order our jeans online to avoid the agony of long lines; we can ask Google our questions instead of waiting for an answer from a person; we can even hop on the internet to schedule dinner reservations to skip waiting for a seat at our favorite restaurant. We sometimes think of wait as a four-letter word. And it is, of course, but “wait” is not a cuss word. We must wait in a doctor’s office or for test results…and that makes us feel out of control. And we are. But what if our attitude was adjusted to focus on how we wait? God doesn’t move any swifter in the twenty-first century than he did in the first. We can’t rush God, but we can allow the time we spend in the “waiting room” to be a time of great personal growth. So we all have a choice: how will we wait? It helps to “invite God into the waiting room.” With this step of faith, we are allowing God to have his way and his will while we wait with him, instead of on him. To put it simply, “God’s will be done, no matter how long it takes.” When we invite God to be part of whatever or whomever we are waiting on, our dark fears, clouded doubts, and gloomy impatience can be countered with the light of his word… It helps to invite God into the waiting room with us, but we must remember that although doubt may join us there, too, we will not let it remain. When God waits with us, our faith is strengthened, our hope is renewed.
Prayer:
Written by Augustine of Hippo (354-430), an early Christian theologian and philosopher. He was the bishop of Hippo Regius (modern day Annaba, Algeria) and is viewed as one of the most important church fathers in Western Christianity.
Lord Jesus, let our minds rest in your Word, so that when doubt and grief would overwhelm us, faith will open our eyes to see your hand at work in our life and enable us to turn toward the future with hope and toward each other in perfect charity. Amen.
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