The Sacred Table Co.

There are a few things I’m still waiting on. I woke this morning holding the same ones I fell asleep with — a relationship I long to see mended, a door I keep hoping will open. Nothing had changed overnight. The waiting was right there where I’d left it.

If I’m honest, waiting has never come easy to me. I would rather do something. Fix it, force it, at least tidy up the edges while I wait. The hardest seasons aren’t always the loud ones. Sometimes they’re the quiet stretch where nothing seems to move, and you start to wonder if you’ve been forgotten in the meantime.

Then I come back to David’s words. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. Read it slowly and you’ll notice he says it twice. As if he knew you’d need telling again on the far side of the sentence, after your resolve had already worn thin.

Waiting for the Lord is not the same as waiting for nothing. It isn’t empty time. “Be strong and take heart” — that’s not the language of sitting idle. It takes courage to keep hoping for a thing you cannot yet see. And He is not idle while you wait. Some of what we long for is growing underground a while before it ever breaks the surface.

So what do you do while you wait? Not nothing. I’m learning that waiting has its own quiet work. You keep showing up to the ordinary faithfulness — the morning prayer, the kindness you can still offer, the next small right thing in front of you. You keep your hands open instead of clenched. You do the part that’s yours, and you leave the part that’s His with Him.

In my own hard season, I asked God for a yellow bird to tell me He still saw me — and a finch landed at my window. He saw me then. He sees you now.

You are not forgotten in the wait. Be strong. Take heart. And wait for the Lord.