Why aren’t we waiting?

Lucy Mills considers how life in a fast-paced world influences our relationship with God ...

We’re not very good at waiting. We live in a world of immediacy, a ‘button click’ culture. We’ve come to expect instant results, quick replies, things that work first time (and we get increasingly exasperated when they don’t).

We often neglect to give things time to grow. We judge on short-term, not long-term results. But life doesn’t always conform to the short-term; it’s too complex, too rich.

We also live in a world of tick lists, an achievement culture. We’re very into achieving things – individual tasks and goals as well as broader ideals of success. Waiting for something to happen chafes against our desire to ‘tick things off’.

Some are much better at waiting than others. Some are more impatient, some have more addictive personalities (loving the feel of a ‘quick fix’), some more prone to distraction, feeling the gaps of life with ‘stuff’.

And let’s be frank – we’re human. We only see the finite view. Humanity has always struggled with seeing beyond itself. Only hindsight occasionally affords us a glimpse of that ‘big picture’ we so often miss.

How does this affect our relationships with God?

‘Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.’ Psalm 27:14 (NIV)

A kind of strength is required for waiting on God. And the less we practise this kind of waiting, the harder it feels.

We get in the habit of not doing something as much as we do by doing something – in order to form a new habit we are often breaking an old one. And breaking habits can feel rather draining.

It’s not just that though, is it? Pressing pause can make us twitchy. We tend to fill up our spare time, either with distractions, addictive pursuits or by ‘making the most of the time’ – i.e. ticking more things off the list.

But what does it mean to wait for God? For God to act? For God to speak? If we want to hear God, if we want to nurture an awareness of God, we are going to need to be willing to spend time in the ‘pauses’ of life. (Let’s face it, we feel guilty about pausing, don’t we?)

There are kinds of waiting which are unhelpful. The kind of waiting which believes that God can only work in our lives when such-and-such has happened, when this or that desire is met. We neglect to seek God in the present, constantly waiting for a future reality which has the ideal conditions – more time, more space, more of this, less of that. That isn’t waiting on God. That’s putting God off until a more ‘convenient time’. And that time never seems to arrive, does it?

Cultivating an attitude of ‘waiting on God’ implies a kind of expectancy, of eyes straining to see God, amid the dreary bits of life and through the rawness of loss, as well as remembering God when it feels as if the sun is shining, at last.

But often we forget to wait, we forget to use our moments of pause to watch for the divine interweaving with our lives in slow but powerful ways. We try and fill each moment with the trivial – not necessarily ‘bad’ stuff, but mediocre moments, refusing to go deeper. Too accustomed to clicking a button to alleviate our boredom, we miss out on the richness the pauses can bring us. I know I do.

As autumn progresses and we look forward to Advent, perhaps we can think about how to use this time. Not to fill it with various kinds of busyness, but instead to pursue simplicity; to find pauses where we can consciously wait; to consider what it means to prepare for Christ’s coming – not just this season, but every season.

For joy can be found in the waiting, in the nurturing of expectant hope, in watching slow growth, in seeking life in all its fullness. Waiting can be hard; but there are treasures to be found – treasures that we would not otherwise see.

In our moments of waiting on God we practise a kind of stillness, reminding ourselves of why we are here and why it is important to us. We shed our own expectations of ‘how life should be’ and instead begin to embrace the mystery of God present with us, in all our smallness.

The person holding a fishing rod by the river, waiting for a bite. The birdwatcher, sitting in a hide beside an empty lakeshore.

When at last the reward comes, when the waiting is over, it is all the more precious.

And we are glad we waited.

Wait for the Lord – be strong, take heart. Wait for the Lord.

Lucy Mills is the author of Forgetful Heart: Remembering God in a Distracted World, available now in paperback and eBook.