God’s Waiting Room

God’s Waiting Room

Everyone

I tossed the magazine down. What a waste of time! This car repair was taking much longer than the mechanics had estimated. I began to mentally calculate how much time I’d spent in waiting that day. First, there was the time on hold waiting to speak to a customer representative, then the long line at the supermarket checkout, followed by the slow-moving line of cars at the fast-food drive-through window, and now this. Hmm, I thought, if I could get someone to pay me for the waiting that I do, I could probably earn my living at it!

Women in the Bible knew about waiting. Sarah waited until she was ninety years old to have the son God promised her. The nation of Israel endured four hundred years of slavery while waiting for God to deliver them from Egypt. The break between the Old and New Testaments represents a period of silence on God’s part because his people had rejected his prophets. For four hundred years, the Israelites waited for word from God until he sent the angel Gabriel to announce John the Baptist’s birth. Six months later, he announced the coming birth of the Savior, whom the world had really been waiting for since the Garden of Eden.

Waiting is an unavoidable part of our lives. We wait for appointments, we stand in lines, and we wait for other people. As uncomfortable as it is, God also makes waiting a part of our Christian lives. We all experience times when God seems silent and unresponsive. Despite all our prayers, we feel stuck in God’s waiting room, wondering when he will act. Although it’s an uncomfortable spot, God uses his waiting room as a classroom for teaching us to trust him. As our faith grows and deepens, we discover that waiting on God is never a waste of time.

Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him.

Psalm 62:5