This post is part of a blog linkup I am participating in to celebrate the launching of Jeff Goins’ new book, The In-Between. I just downloaded it on my kindle and haven’t read it yet, but I have read several excerpts from it and I think it’s going to be great! If you want to make the most of your times of waiting, whether big or small, read his book. It will encourage you to live every moment to the fullest and to learn to appreciate the moments we tend to find irritating. Find out more about it and watch the trailer here.
There are many different kinds of waiting. There’s the “drumming the fingers on the steering wheel while sitting at a red light” waiting. There’s the “looking forward to the weekend” waiting. There’s the “dreading the visit to the doctor” waiting. There are long waits, and short waits, happy waits and sad waits. (Before this gets to sound too much like a Dr. Seuss book, let me get on with my point.)
But there’s one universal trait to waiting. No one really likes it. If there were a button that we could push to skip over the “in-between” moments of our lives, like we skip over commercials, we’d love it, wouldn’t we?
I certainly would have loved to have one of those buttons in high school. The predominant feeling that I had during my first years of high school when I thought about the future was that I was waiting for my life to begin. While my friends were taking SATs and applying to colleges and choosing majors, I was waiting. Stuck in the biggest in-between time of my life. Oh, I talked about college and had dreams for the future too, but nothing concrete was happening.
I was just waiting.
But while I was waiting, I was doing something that made all the difference for my future, that gave me hope and purpose during my in-between time.
I was praying.
Praying, begging God fervently to lead me into the future He had for me. More than my own dreams of grand adventures, I wanted to do God’s will for my life, because I knew that was the only future I would be happy with. As I prayed, and waited, and prayed some more, there were times when I struggled to believe that God was ever going to give me the wisdom I pleaded for. There were times that the future looked like an impenetrable wall of fog, and I wondered if I would ever get through it and find out what was on the other side.
Waiting can make us feel helpless and sometimes hopeless. But it doesn’t have to. {Tweet this}
As I waited, I had to believe that He was going to answer me and guide me into the future He had for me. If I wanted His will for my life, there was no other choice. I had to learn to willfully put my trust in God, even when I didn’t know what His plans were for me and when He would reveal them to me. I claimed His promises in Luke 11:9-10:
“So I say to you, keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
And James 1: 5-8:
“Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and without criticizing, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith without doubting. For the doubter is like the surging sea, driven and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. An indecisive man is unstable in all his ways.”
Through my time of waiting, God gave me the strength to trust Him and the faith to believe His promises, that if I kept asking and kept believing He would answer me. And you know what? He did! With an answer that was better than anything I could have wished for.
Somewhere, between my junior and senior years of high school, I knew. I knew, as surely as I knew my name, that God wanted me to be a writer. And even more than that, I was excited that He had chosen that calling for me. It suited me perfectly.
Through my time of waiting, not only did I find out what God wanted me to pursue as my career, but I also learned deep, powerful lessons that have stayed with me. My faith in God’s faithfulness and goodness is stronger now, and I have learned that it is possible for this undisciplined person to persevere in prayer.
In making us wait for our answers, God gives us more than we ask for. {Tweet this}
So often we wish that we could skip over the in-between times of our lives, the times of wondering and uncertainty and of plain old waiting. But those times hold wonderful lessons for us, and if we don’t learn to embrace them and be grateful for them, we might miss out on some of the most important times of our lives.
One of the best lessons I learned from waiting is to embrace the process. Waiting forces us to acknowledge our own helplessness and rely on God. {Tweet this} And as hard as that is, once we realize how good and in control God is, it becomes a rather enjoyable process to rest in His faithfulness and wait for Him to bring about His amazing plans.
Don’t forget to check out the book The In-Between by Jeff Goins! If you order it by August 10th you get some great free bonuses!
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