Do You Hate to Wait?

I do.

Oh, yeah. I’m a wait-hater.

If you’ve followed my blog for more than two weeks you already know this. Patience is not my gig. Grousing feels exponentially more cathartic for me. “Hurry up and wait” is my hair-ripping, life-long archenemy.

The bad part about patience is I’m a slow learner and must relearn the same lessons over and over. I can hear Papa God rolling His eyes at me. The good part is that from your responses regarding my books and blog posts on this subject over the years, I’ve learned that there are a lot of you in the Lord-teach-me-to-wait-with-grace dinghy with me and we’re glad to be rowing in unison, even though sometimes we feel like we’re not getting very far upstream before capsizing over a submerged boulder.

Then we must grasp hands and climb back in boat to navigate the white water again.

After recently pacing a waiting room like a caged lion, I came home and opened my Bible, determined to see how those longsuffering believers that came before did it. What did they know that I don’t about waiting on the Lord? Here are some of the eye-openers I discovered:

• Sarah waited 90 years for God to fulfill His promise that she would bear a child (21st chapter of Genesis) and her response to the news was snarky laughter. Okay. I can relate to that. 
• Noah spent 100 years building an ark on dry land (Genesis 6 -8) faithfully waiting for the Almighty’s vow of a catastrophic flood to come true. Then when it finally began to rain, he waited another 40 storm-tossed days, then sloshed around the prevailing waters for yet another 150 days while the waters receded. Bible scholars estimate the flood lasted one solar year – a little over twelve months. The Hebrew term for waited was used repeatedly in the biblical account. Wait and wait and wait some more. Yep. Got it.

  

• The children of Israel waited nearly 400 years for Jehovah to fulfill His promise of giving the pagan land of Canaan to Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob (whom God renamed Israel). Much of that time was spent in slavery and subservience in the foreign land of Egypt and the Israelites were not happy campers during their wait. Hmm. Gripe. Complain. Grouse. I can relate to that too.
• Moses waited to enter the promised land for forty years as he led the rebellious children of Israel around a barren desert. He never got to see God’s promise fulfilled because of his personal sin, but he continued to trust Yahweh and believe that the promise would indeed come to pass (which it did) for someone, even if not for him. Talk about hope deferred. I get that concept more than I wish I did.
• Hannah waited many years for the Lord to open her “closed” womb (1 Samuel, chapter 1) as she “wept bitterly” while endured taunting and cruel ridicule over her barren state. With six miscarriages under my belt, I felt pretty closed too, but my misery was mostly self-imposed as I waited to hold a baby that never came … until twenty years later when my beautiful adopted grandbaby arrived, looking just like the brown-eyed girl in my recurrent dreams. 

So apparently there are LOTS of examples of wait-haters in the scriptures who plodded along through the wilderness waiting periods of their life and found redemptive fulfillment on the other side of the desert. And I find that the more I read their stories and percolate the challenges they must have gone through, the more patience seems to bubble up inside my innards and fill me with hope.

And I need as many of those hope-bubbles that I can get.

How about you, dear BFF (Blessed Friend Forever)? What biblical waiting account do you identify with that helps you through your own waiting wilderness? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Let’s grow from each others’ experiences.