When my husband, Jeff, and I got married we knew we wanted to have kids. We dreamed about our future family and debated how many kids we would have, 3 or 4 or sometimes even 5! We picked out names and we tried to plan when we would get pregnant so we could have a baby at the “ideal” time. It makes me chuckle to look back on that time and remember those conversations.
Of course it didn’t work that way. God had other plans for us and our family and asked us to journey through things we wouldn’t have chosen.
Despite a strong family history of fertility, we struggled to get pregnant. We waited and prayed and hurt as month after month passed with no baby. Finally we were pregnant and we rejoiced! A couple years later we were pregnant with our second child, a girl, and we had pretty major complications. We spent 12 weeks on bedrest, waiting. Waiting to reach the time in pregnancy where our baby girl would even have a possibility of survival, waiting until we were far enough along that our baby would likely survive without major complications. Then she was born, 5 weeks early, and we waited for her in the NICU. We waited for her to outgrow her complications from prematurity. We waited.
And waiting sucks.
I’ve recently found myself in another season of waiting and it’s not gotten any easier. I was talking with a friend the other day and he asked me, “If I asked you to be patient and wait a little longer, what would you say?” I thought for a minute, and choking back tears, I said, “It would make me want to cry.”
Later that day I was thinking back on that conversation and was reminded of all the times that God asked people to wait in the Bible. I thought of Abraham and Sarah waiting for the baby God had promised them. I remembered the Israelites enslaved in Egypt waiting for deliverance. I thought again of the Israelites wandering in the desert and waiting for the Promised Land. I thought about all the years spent waiting for Jesus and it reminded me that God’s got a plan.
I was emailing with a member of the church last week and she shared about Isaiah 55:8-9 inspiring her and I found it comforting in this season of waiting. It says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways….so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” These verses reminded me that God’s got this, no matter how hard the waiting is.
So if you’ve found yourself in a season of waiting, know I feel your pain and I hope those verses from Isaiah also bring you a little comfort. Hopefully we’ll all be able to look back someday and see how, throughout the waiting, God had it all under control.