Almost nobody is good at waiting, and almost everybody has to do a great deal of it. We wait for results, for healing, for a relationship to mend or to begin, for a prayer that has gone quiet to be answered. And the waiting rarely feels like part of life. It feels like the gap in life — the dead stretch between the last thing and the next, time to be endured and got through, ideally as quickly as possible.
The Bible takes a strikingly different view. In Scripture, waiting is not the empty space between the real events. Often it is the event. It is where the most important work gets done, much of it in us.
Waiting is not nothing
The Psalms are full of people waiting, and they do not pretend it is easy. But notice how the instruction tends to be framed:
Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD. (Ps. 27:14, NIV)
It is worth dwelling on what is being asked. Be strong and take heart. Those are not the words you use for a passive, slumped sort of waiting — killing time in a queue, refreshing the screen. They are the language of courage, the kind you summon for a hard task. The psalmist treats waiting as something you do actively, with your whole heart engaged, not a posture you collapse into while real life is on pause.
And the object matters as much as the verb. Wait for the LORD. Not merely for the outcome, the answer, the change in circumstances — but for God himself. The difference is everything. You can wait for a thing and grow only more anxious as it fails to arrive. To wait for the Lord is to keep company with him in the meantime, trusting that he is at work even when nothing is visible. The waiting stops being empty the moment you realise who is in it with you.
Abraham, and an old man in the temple
Scripture’s great figures are, over and over, people who waited a long time.
Abraham was promised descendants beyond counting and then spent decades childless, growing old with his wife while the promise sat there unfulfilled. The waiting was not incidental to his faith; it was where his faith was forged. By the time Isaac finally came, Abraham had learned to trust the One who promised rather than the visible evidence — and the New Testament holds him up forever after as the pattern of a man who believed God against all the odds the waiting threw at him.
Then there is a quieter figure, easy to miss. In Luke’s account of Jesus’ infancy, an old man named Simeon has spent his life waiting on a single promise — that he would not die before he saw the Lord’s Messiah. We are told only that he was righteous and devout and waiting. One day the Spirit moves him to go into the temple, and a poor couple walk in with a baby. Simeon takes the child in his arms:
Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation. (Luke 2:29–30, NIV)
A lifetime of waiting, answered by an infant. And notice what his waiting had made of him: not bitter, not resigned, but ready — alert enough to recognise the salvation of God in an ordinary-looking child that everyone else in the temple walked straight past. The years of waiting were the years that prepared his eyes to see.
Hope that has an anchor
Here is what saves Christian waiting from becoming mere endurance. It is not waiting in the dark for who-knows-what. It is hope, and biblical hope is not a wish — it is a confident expectation grounded in a promise already kept.
Christians wait, finally, for the return of Christ and the setting-right of all things. We do it the way the early believers did, who knew the worst had already happened to Jesus and the best had already begun in his resurrection. Paul describes the whole creation as groaning, and us along with it, waiting:
But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Rom. 8:25, NIV)
That patience is possible because the outcome is not in doubt. The empty tomb is the down payment. The waiting is real and sometimes long, but it is waiting for something sure, the way you wait for a sunrise you cannot yet see but have every reason to expect.
A practical word
If you are in a long wait right now, resist two temptations. The first is to treat the waiting as wasted — to live with your real life suspended until the answer comes, missing whatever God is doing in you in the meantime. The second is to fixate so hard on the outcome that you forget to wait for the Lord himself.
Try, instead, a small reorientation. In the waiting, keep company with God. Bring him the impatience honestly; the Psalms give you full permission. And let your hope rest not on a timeline but on his character and his promise. Like Simeon, you may find that the waiting was quietly making you ready — training your eyes to recognise the answer when at last it arrives, perhaps looking nothing like you expected, and far better than you hoped.