Held in the Waiting

Held in the Waiting

I find waiting difficult. Not because I am impatient by nature — though I am — but because waiting feels passive, and passivity feels like failure. Surely, I tell myself, there is something I should be doing.

But there is a quality of waiting that scripture treats as something other than inaction. The Hebrew word qavah — translated as 'wait' in Psalm 27 and Isaiah 40 — carries the sense of twisting together, of being woven into, of a rope being braided. To wait on the Lord is not to sit still and hope. It is to remain bound to Him through the season of not yet.

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord. (Psalm 27:14)

Wait — be strong — wait. The repetition is not careless. It acknowledges that the instruction needs restating. That waiting is something we have to return to. That strength and waiting are not opposites but companions.

I have been in a season of waiting for something. I will not name it here — you will have your own. But what I have been learning is that the waiting is not empty. God is not absent from it. He is, in fact, working in it — in me, not only in the circumstances I am watching for a change in.

The fruit that forms in waiting seasons is not like any other fruit. It is grown slowly, under pressure, in the absence of the resolution I thought I needed. Steadiness. A quiet trust that does not require evidence to keep going. A willingness to release control of the timeline.

If you are waiting today — for a word, a change, a healing, a door — you are not forgotten. You are held. And the waiting itself is being used.