“You can get so confused
that you’ll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...
...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or the waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for the wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.”
Dr. Seuss's "Oh, The Places You'll Go!," which describes the twists and turns of life's journey, is so insightful. (I've linked to the whole thing here.) There's one stop on the journey I want to talk about today. It's the portion I excerpted above that describes that dreaded, "most useless" place — The Waiting Place.
Waiting can certainly feel useless, can't it? During long periods of waiting, not much seems to be going on in the way of our deliverance. Everything comes to a standstill in our world, and yet the world around us keeps moving on. The blessed keep getting more blessed, but we remain stuck.
That's how it can feel, can't it? But it's not true.
Everyone goes through seasons of waiting, and waiting on God is anything but useless. In fact, it's probably one of the most character-building experiences we can go through in this life. But how we wait is what will determine how peaceful or miserable our stay in The Waiting Place will be.
One of my favorite Scripture passages comes from Lamentations 3: "The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for deliverance from the Lord" (vv. 25-26). The Hebrew word translated as "wait" in verse 25 means 3 things in addition to waiting. It means "to expect, to look for, to hope."
These 3 verbs (expect, look, hope) show action on our part. So one thing waiting on the Lord doesn't mean is resignation: "Well, clearly God isn't going to give me what I'm asking for, so He can just do whatever He wants." Or, "I've been hoping for this for so long and still nothing. I need to stop hoping altogether so I don't get hurt even more." Resignation is what happens when someone gives up, but giving up is not an option for the one who actively waits on the Lord.
Instead, the waiting one should be like Habakkuk, who said, "I will climb up to my watchtower and stand at my guardpost. There I will wait to see what the Lord says and how he will answer my complaint" (2:1). Habakkuk wasted no time in climbing to the top of the watchtower to see how God would answer. He knew it was a matter of when, not if.
Each day as we pray for whatever it is we are waiting for, we should "bring [our] requests to [the Lord]," climb the watchtower to look for His answer, and "wait expectantly" (Psalm 5:3). We aren't waiting well if we aren't waiting with expectation, looking eagerly in the distance to see when and how God is going to answer our request.
In fact, biblical waiting requires expectation — if it doesn't have that, then it's resignation, not waiting.
And here's where hope comes in. Hope is what causes us to wait with expectation, to look eagerly — excitedly — on our watchtowers to see how God will answer us.
"Hope is a waking dream," as Aristotle put it. It's that wonderful feeling when you're wide awake that anything is possible. That sounds like wishful thinking to the one who has suffered disappointment, doesn't it? Like the voice of someone who hasn't been kicked around enough by life. Why would I keep hoping when my dreams have been dashed over and over again? we might think. I'm not a glutton for punishment you know! And on the surface this line of thinking sounds reasonable ... even responsible and practical.
But the funny thing about hope — biblical hope, which is real hope — is that it's actually birthed out of suffering and disappointment: "But we also rejoice in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope" (Romans 5:3-4). Suffering, in the end, produces hope. Naive, wishful thinking that hasn't gone through the furnace of affliction, then, isn't hope at all — it's just wishful thinking, and will remain so until it is sanctified.
But the hope produced in the furnace of affliction is a sanctified hope, a hope that the Lord Himself has placed in the heart of the one afflicted. It's a confidence that emerges from a trial and says, "I know the one in whom I have placed my confidence, and I am perfectly certain that the work he has committed to me is safe in his hands" (2 Tim. 1:12). In the furnace — in The Waiting Place — where we are tempted to give up hope, God is actually working hope in us for the future He has planned for us (which might be very different from the future we have planned for ourselves).
It sounds so backwards, but suffering, waiting, and disappointment are all necessary for hope to grow.
Although sometimes it can feel like the waiting will never end, it will. As Dr. Seuss went on to write, "Somehow you'll escape all that waiting and staying. You'll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing." Look for those "bright places," expectant and hopeful that your good Father "is able to do far more than we ever dare to ask or imagine" (Eph. 3:20). God has things up His sleeve so amazing that they exceed even our wildest imaginings.
If you're in The Waiting Place, I pray that the Lord does His work in you so you can emerge filled with hope, saying, "I know the one in whom I have placed my confidence, and I am perfectly certain that the work he has committed to me is safe in his hands" (2 Tim. 1:12).
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