The Blessing Of Waiting

By Andrea Lucado

If you had to read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses in high school, you might remember this quote:

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

Have truer words ever been written? We all spend a lot of time in the place between what we want to happen and that thing actually happening. We are all waiting for our wishes to come true, whatever those wishes may be.

I thought about this while I was working out the other night. I go to an hour-long workout class a few times a week. As soon as the class starts, I anticipate its ending. From the first minute, I’m ready for the class to be over, because working out is hard.

But do you know what happens between the beginning of a workout and the end?  The work out. The actual exercising part happens. Without the middle part, there would be no sense of satisfaction at the end. There would be no reason to anticipate the ending, because no work would have been done, and therefore, no results would occur. There would be no change to my mind or my cholesterol levels.

The Bible is full of stories about people who are living between the wish and the thing. God made a promise to them, but it wasn’t going to happen immediately. They had to wait. A few weeks, ago we talked about the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land. They had to wait on God’s guidance, and their route was anything but direct. It took them 40 years to get there!

Abraham also had to wait on the Lord. In Genesis 15, God made a promise to Abraham.

He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.” Genesis 15:5

The thing is, at this time Abraham had no children of his own.  It’s not until Genesis 21 that his son Isaac is born, which was years after God promised Abraham a long lineage of descendants. A lot happened between God’s promise and its fulfillment. A lot of struggle for Abraham and his wife, Sarah. A lot of heartache. But in this time, God made a covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17) and changed his name from Abram to Abraham.

Between the wish and the thing, there was struggle for Abraham, but there was also a deepening of his relationship with God.

When Sarah did finally give birth to Isaac, Abraham was 100 years old. You had better believe Abraham’s faith in God was strengthened the day he held his son and saw God’s promise to him fulfilled.

The space between Abraham’s wish (a descendant) and the fulfillment of his wish (the birth of Isaac) was hard and difficult. It probably left him feeling breathless, hopeless and discouraged, but it was right there, in the time of waiting, that Abraham grew and changed (even his name changed), and it was right there that his relationship with God deepened.

Like my hour-long workout class, the space between the wish and the thing is difficult, but it’s the place where we change and where we grow.

What are you lying in wait for? How long has it been? Are you on the brink of giving up? Some things we lie in wait for take days. Some things, like Abraham and Sarah waiting to conceive, take years. But if we can fight the bitterness, if we can lean on something bigger and more powerful than our own weak selves, we will turn around one day and see that during the tension, we were formed into a person with stronger, deeper, more loving, understanding and patient stuff. And during the tension, our relationship with God deepened and our faith was strengthened.

The space between the wish and the thing is the place where God wants us to be. For it is during the tension, and not at the end once the thing is achieved, that we are becoming who were meant to be all along.

You can read more about Abraham and Sarah’s fascinating story in our study Genesis: The Beginning of Everything.