Waiting on the Lord

 

During the approximately 4 ½ months between when I left my previous job of 20 years in mid-May and started my new job in early October, I did a lot of things. I traveled a bunch and played golf 50 times. I kept a full calendar of professional meetings for purposes of networking and job search. And I spent a significant amount of time journaling about the entirety of my life experiences and the themes and lessons contained in them.

But perhaps the most important thing I did was wait on the Lord.

Waiting feels and is passive. Waiting is the opposite of acting. And yet, in a very real way, waiting requires intentionality. Because of our general impatience and my own action orientation, it feels like waiting is an act I must choose. And, for those 4 ½ months of uncertainty, I did indeed choose to wait on the Lord.

To be sure, waiting on the Lord includes prayer, Bible reading, and other active forms of communing with the divine. But, it also includes the opposite of action, to the extent that action is intended to accelerate something being accomplished, an outcome being determined, a destination being reached. Waiting on the Lord, while an act of will, is an act of will to not act, but rather to…wait. To slow down and just be, rather than try to speed things up.

The Bible records a lot of humans in the act of waiting on the Lord. It is a demonstration of faith, of obedience, and of trust, in God’s unshakeable presence and goodness and provision. It is, naturally, something we humans are terrible at, and something we humans would benefit greatly from. It is, to hit closer to home, something I am terrible at, and therefore something I benefitted greatly from this year.

Something that helped me through this uncomfortable act was to remember that waiting in the present to know what will happen in the future becomes easier when we reflect on how this all played out in the past. If God was faithful all the other times we were in the same situation, it makes it easier to trust He will be faithful this time too, and therefore it makes it easier to wait for that faithfulness to become manifest.

Of course, time is weird. I can think back on my own life journey from birth to today, and see all the highs and lows and patterns and trends. What I can’t do is see any of those things in the future. So, regardless of how much evidence there is of God’s faithfulness so far, it is an act of faith to trust in God’s faithfulness to come.

My current job is only my third ever, having worked at my first for 10 years and my second for 20. Something I reminded myself a bunch of this year was that, at the same point before my first and second jobs, I was similarly in the dark about what my next opportunity would be and when it would materialize. So while I suffered from a lot of anxiety, dread, and regret along the way, I could also fight to keep myself in the serenity of knowing that just as I was similarly blessed with the arrival of my first and second jobs, so could I look forward to the perfect provision and timing of my third job.

It was good for me to wait. I didn’t always do it well. But I did it. And I’m better for it.