I wonder if you ever thought about this: When God has you in a waiting room where there is absolutely nothing you can do but wait, and it looks disastrous to you, then He's got you backed into a corner where you finally can learn to trust Him.
When we can accept our waiting periods, even though we don't understand what's happening, and tell the Lord that we choose to trust Him anyway, we then transfer the responsibility for the situation over to God and the monkey is off our backs. You fight it and fight it, but finally you stop the questioning, end the struggle, give up and turn it over to God, and it then suddenly dawns on you that you are free. You say to yourself, "Why did I fight so long?" And you start to learn how wonderful it is to trust God and walk by faith, especially during those waiting periods of your life.
Frequently before God responds to our need, He has to adjust us to the trouble and cause us to learn a much-needed lesson. Maybe He wants to teach us that we can face and endure trouble as long as He is with us in the trouble. Then He will take us out of it. But it will not happen until we have stopped being restless and fretful about it. He may be waiting for us to be calm and quiet. Then He can say, "It is enough."
David wrote, "I waited patiently for the Lord and he turned to me and heard my cry" (Psalm 40:1). That's a great secret–waiting patiently. Many times we are forced to wait, but we don't do it patiently. How are you handling your waiting period? Losing sleep, biting fingernails, pacing the floor, snapping off heads? That's not trustful, patient waiting. We need to learn to wait patiently for Him. That means we're truly trusting Him.
Paul Billheimer wrote in Adventures in Adversity: "There can be no testing of character without delays...It is easy to be impatient with God when we fail to understand the purpose of his delay. However, God is willing to be misunderstood in the universe he has made, in order to achieve his purpose of character development."
Don't we frequently misunderstand God when He puts us in the waiting room? We may even doubt His love and care for us, for our minds tell us that if He really cared, He'd move on our behalf right now. But God is willing to have us misunderstand Him in order to achieve His goal for us: teaching us to walk by faith and not by sight.
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