God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Waiting: When God Says “Not Yet”

Countdown to God’s Healing: I’m excited to announce that BMH Books will release my fifth book soon (in May 2010). To read a sample section of God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting click here. To pre-order your autographed copy at 30% off, visit here. As we countdown to the release, I’ll be sharing periodic excerpts, such as today’s post: Waiting: When God Says “Not Yet.”

Waiting: Trusting with Faith Rather Than Regrouping with Self-Sufficiency

You’re in an emotional casket. Finally, you’ve come face-to-face with death and with utter human hopelessness. Do you want to stay there? No! Frantic to escape? Yes! You cry out to God for help. What does He say?

“Wait.”

Now you’re at a faith-point. “I trust Him; I trust Him not. I’ll wait; I’ll not wait.” Which will it be? Will you wait or regroup? Will you wait on God or will you self-sufficiently depend upon yourself?

Regrouping: Taking Matters into My Own Hands

John 4 illustrates the contrast between waiting and regrouping. The woman at the well was in a husband-casket. One husband left the scene, “Encore! Encore!” she’d shout, bringing the curtain down on another failed marriage. Frantically she searched time after time for a man she could have—a man she could desperately clutch who would meet her desperate needs by desperately desiring her above all else.

We don’t know what came next for her after she surrendered her thirsts to Christ. Certainly, if she were to live out her new Christ-life, she would have to change her habitual pattern of regrouping through “having” a man. Suppose that she took her longing to God in prayer. Presuppose God told her to stop living with this man who was not her husband. Don’t you think that on a human plane she would experience excruciating emptiness, starving hunger?

So she prays to God, “Father, I know that all I need is You and what You choose to provide. I’m cleaning up my life. Would You please send me a godly man.”

God says, “Wait. Delay your gratification. Don’t get involved with a man.” Everything inside her—her flesh-habituated past way of surviving, her cistern-digging style of relating—craves satisfaction now. If she regroups, she grasps yet another husband on the rebound. She takes matters into her own hands.

Waiting: Refusing to Demand Heaven Now

So what would “hope” look like in her immediate context? Hoping in God, she would choose delayed gratification over immediate gratification. She would accept her singleness, clinging to God and trusting His timing.

Hope waits. Hope is the refusal to demand heaven now.

If hope leads to waiting, what then is waiting? Waiting is trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for myself. Waiting is refusing to take over while refusing to give up. Waiting refuses self-rescue.

Tony Compolo preaches a message where he repeatedly says, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s comin’.” He’s focusing his audience on Friday-truth: the crucifixion of Christ, and on Sunday-truth: the coming resurrection of Christ. I would change the metaphor a tad because we aren’t living on Friday, we’re living on Saturday. Symbolically, life lived on fallen planet Earth is Saturday living—the day between the crucifixion and the resurrection. The day of waiting. The day that tests our trust.

You’ll never see waiting as one of the stages in any research study because it is not natural in a fallen world. It’s supernatural.

Tim and Terri’s Waiting Journey: On the Rebound

I once worked with a missionary couple (we’ll call them Tim and Terri) whose mission agency refused to allow them to return to the field. In essence, they were fired without cause. The situation appeared to be nothing more than a power struggle.

We were working through the candor, complaint, cry, and comfort process. When we began to explore the waiting stage, Tim battled. Everything in him wanted, almost desperately needed, to regroup. He was ready to join a ministry, any ministry, on the rebound. He was ready to take a job, any job, on the rebound. However, I counseled him to wait before making any long-term commitments to a new ministry position because I sensed that he was motivated by a desire for self-rescue, for regrouping, not by a desire to wait on God.

The Rest of the Story

Was my counsel too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good? Can we find biblical support for the principle of waiting rather than regrouping? Return for the next blog post when we’ll explore some biblical waiting samplers about Clinging to God’s Rope of Hope.

Join the Conversation

Waiting is refusing to take over while refusing to give up. Where can we find the strength to keep trusting when God says, “Not yet”?