The Waiting

Sometimes waiting on God is the loneliest place man can venture. It is still. It is quiet. You strain to hear His voice, to have Him step down from His heavenly throne to visit you for a while. You long for Him to make sense of all the random pieces of your life, for Him to show you why it was a good thing that your heart was broken way back when… You remember the words He spoke to you long ago, when you were just a baby in Him. You remember how it felt when everything was fresh and new. You remember how you saw with such clear eyes and how you had such an eager heart to do the will of the Father. Then the years pass and pass and pass and you’re tempted to forget the things He had spoken to you when you were young. The years, the time, threaten to kill your hopes and your dreams. They threaten to steal your seed of hope, your seed of faith. The trials will either kill your faith or make it stronger. Which will it be?

You enter a place in your faith where you cannot go back to what you used to be. You cannot claim the ignorance you once had, though your ignorance was at times, bliss. You enter a place of such loneliness and not a single, living human being can understand the depth of your longing and loneliness. Even you don’t understand you. Only the prophets of old and the living God can understand you. You just know that you are still not satisfied. The sobering reality is you shall never be satisfied in this life. There will be moments, seasons, periods of time that you feel all of heaven surrounding you and for that brief and passing moment, you are satisfied. But those moments do not last long. They are fleeting and you are left, once again, hungering and thirsting for the Bread of Life and the Water of the Spirit.

Oftentimes, looking back to your past is death. God implicitly instructed Lot and his wife not to look back, but she did anyways and in that very moment, she died. She died because she stopped looking ahead. She died because she gave into the temptation to look at what she left behind her, to revisit the pain of the past. And in one, brief second, it consumed her. It overtook and killed her.

In our times of waiting, in our times of loneliness and quiet, we are often tempted to look back. Don’t. Don’t look back. Fight and fight hard to look ahead, to keep hope alive.

Be still my soul and wait upon the Lord.