The Grace Between

There is something exciting about waiting for something  you know is coming. 

I was reminded of this while standing in my kitchen watching a batch of chocolate chip cookies bake in the oven. They weren’t ready yet, but I could smell them. I could imagine that first bite, how they would taste. The gooey chocolate chip morsels melting in my mouth. 

Watching them bake, I wasn’t waiting with dread or worry, I was waiting with anticipation. It caused me to think, maybe waiting isn’t always about what we’re missing. Maybe sometimes it’s about what we’re anticipating. 

The waiting hadn’t changed, but somehow, the way I was waiting had.

There are so many different kinds of waiting in life. Sometimes we’re anxious because we don’t know what’s coming. I experienced this form of waiting when my college graduation was approaching.  I didn’t know where I would end up, whether I’d find a job, or whether the career I’d spent years preparing for would actually be the right one for me. I had so many questions and very few answers.

Other times, we know something good is coming and the waiting itself becomes exciting. I am a theme park fanatic and each time our family has a trip coming up where we are planning to go to a theme park, I can hardly wait. I look up the rides, study the maps, read tips for getting the most out of our day, and weigh the pros and cons of purchasing a fast pass. The closer the trip gets, the more excited I become.

Then again, there are times when waiting is a mix of the two, a strange combination of anxiety and excitement. I remember this kind of waiting well when I was expecting my first son. I was so excited to meet the little person I’d prayed and waited for, but I was also filled with questions about everything that was about to change. 

I wanted to rush toward the moment I would finally meet him, but I also knew that once he arrived, this particular season of waiting would be over. There was excitement in knowing I was getting closer to meeting my son, but there was also so much uncertainty surrounding everything that waited for me on the other side of his arrival. 

Maybe that’s what makes waiting so interesting. The circumstances may change, but the waiting itself is always asking something of us. 

Looking back at the various seasons of waiting in my life reminds me a lot of those cookies that were sitting in the oven. I knew something was coming, I just had to wait for the right time to experience it. Just like with the cookies, sometimes the hardest part is trusting that there is a right time even when we can’t see why we’re being asked to wait. If I took the cookies out too early, they wouldn’t be cooked all the way through. Take them out too late and they would be burnt. Trusting the timing is key.

Of course life isn’t always as simple as cookies baking in an oven and often the risks are a lot more consequential than a few burnt cookies. They can also be much more rewarding that a temporary satiation on the tongue that cookies can provide.

We don’t always know what’s coming at the end of our waiting, and sometimes we may hope it doesn’t come at all. However, I believe there is something worth learning from the anticipation that changes our experience with times of waiting. The circumstance hasn’t necessarily changed the waiting itself. Our expectation changes how we experience it.

What if we learned to wait for God with that same kind of anticipation? What if our anticipation wasn’t centered on an outcome, but on God? What would it look like to anticipate God’s presence? To become filled with excitement about communing with Him and His plan for our life? What would it look like to expect Him to meet you in the waiting? Instead of being filled with worry or dread, being filled with trust in His sovereignty and love for His children, wanting the best for us and our future. We can have hope without having certainty about the outcome because we know His character and heart.

Anticipating God isn’t the same thing as anticipating a particular outcome. I think sometimes when we say we’re waiting on God, what we really mean is that we’re waiting for God to do something. We often say things like “I’m waiting on God” when what we really mean is “I’m waiting for God to give me the answer I want.” We’re waiting for the job offer, the relationship, the healing, the baby, the financial breakthrough, the answer to the prayer we’ve been praying over and over again. 

There is nothing wrong with bringing those desires to God. It is actually scriptural to do so. “In everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God,”(Philippians 4:6). I wonder though, what if, while we wait for the answer, we also learned to anticipate the God who is already with us?

Instead of anticipating what we want God to do, we can anticipate what God might want to do in us. Maybe He is using the season of waiting to teach us something we couldn’t learn any other way. Maybe God is developing patience in us, deepening our faith, exposing places where we have been relying on control, or teaching us that His presence is enough even when His answer isn’t what we expected.

James tells us to consider it joy when we face trials because the testing of our faith produces perseverance. (James 1:2–4) That doesn’t mean we have to enjoy the waiting. It means we can begin to anticipate that God is doing something in us through it.

What if we anticipated His faithfulness? We can never know the exact way a situation will play out, or exactly what He will do, but we do know who He is and always has been. Hebrews tells us He’s the same yesterday, today, and to come (Hebrews 13:8). His character isn’t dependent on our circumstances. His faithfulness doesn’t disappear when the answer takes longer than we hoped, or if the answer unfolds in a way different from how we expected. 

I have often heard the saying “We may not know what tomorrow holds , but we know the one who holds tomorrow.”  Do we truly live like we believe that statement? 

What if we anticipated that He would meet us where we are? Sometimes we think we have to make it through the waiting before we can experience God. We imagine that once the prayer is answered, the diagnosis changes, the door opens, or the circumstances finally make sense, then we will see Him. God is not a finish line God. He is not the coach at the end waiting for you to break through the banner at the end of the race. He is right there running with you, and often running for you carrying you when you feel you can’t take another step or you might run out of breath. 

Psalm 46:1 calls Him “a very present help in trouble.” Not a distant help. Not a future help. A present help.

One of my favorite sermons my husband has preached is that of the prodigal son. This is a story I, like so many, grew up with and always saw God as the father waiting with arms open wide upon the son’s return. However, as my husbands speaks on the story, he points out God wouldn’t have been sitting at home watching for the son to return, he would have been with Him the whole time in those dark moments, in the pig pen. Scripture tells us He is a good Shepard, leaving the 99 to chase after the 1. 

And what if we anticipated His goodness even when we didn’t know what His goodness would look like?

This may be the hardest kind of anticipation. It’s easy to believe God is good when His goodness looks like the answer we were hoping for. It’s harder when His goodness looks different than we imagined.

Scripture tells us, “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good” (Psalm 34:8). Notice that it doesn’t say, “Taste and see that life always turns out the way you hoped.” It says that He is good.

His goodness is not defined by whether He gives us the outcome we wanted. His goodness is found in who He is.

And maybe that is where anticipation changes everything. Instead of waiting for God to give us what we want, we can begin waiting expectantly for God Himself. We can wake up wondering what He might teach us today. We can walk through uncertainty trusting that He will be faithful. We can enter difficult seasons expecting Him to meet us there. We can look toward the unknown believing that His goodness will meet us on the other side, even if it looks nothing like we imagined.

One of my favorite verses is Romans 8:28 which tells us that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. We may not be able to see how the pieces fit together while we’re living in the middle of them, but maybe we don’t have to. 

Maybe faith is learning to stand in the kitchen, watching the cookies bake, smelling what’s coming before we can taste it, and trusting that the One who knows the right time knows what He is doing.

What if, instead of asking only, “God, when will this be over?” we began asking, “God, what do You want to show me here?” What if instead of anxiously asking, “What is going to happen?” We could say, “I don’t know what is coming, but I know You will be there.” What if we stopped anticipating an answer and started anticipating His presence? 

The waiting has not changed, but instead, the way we wait has. Because we may not know what is waiting for us on the other side of this season, but we know Who is waiting with us in it.

And maybe that is enough to turn waiting from something we endure into something we learn to anticipate.