As military families we are well acquainted with many colloquialisms. A favorite of mine is “hurry up and wait.” We understand waiting because it’s woven throughout the necessity of serving our Nation. Waiting goes along with the training, field operations or work up missions for the service member. And it’s no secret that families definitely learn to wait when deployment orders are executed. Four years of my life has been spent waiting on deployment to end!
We are familiar with waiting in lines with a number in hand for our turn to get an ID card, for our commissary deli meat order or for our prescriptions at the pharmacy. Even more nail-biting, we wait to see if we got seats on a Space-A flight! We wait regularly for gate traffic, medical referrals from our PCM, base housing availability or that EAS date.
We are people accustomed to waiting- masters, indeed! And yet most people would say one of the hardest things in this lifestyle is the WAITING. We hate to wait. It’d be so much easier to just *know* when homecoming will be, what’s our next address, if our spouse will achieve promotion, what school our children will transfer to. We like the sense of control knowledge gives to us.
We go to lengths to eliminate waiting from our everyday lives. We grab Chick-Fil-A from one event to the next because we don’t have time to wait. We snap pictures of life and upload them to social media- hello, INSTAgram. We like days without delays and moments without pause. But waiting will always exist no matter how many remedies we try to create to eliminate it- a reality most felt in the confines of this military life.
God has a lot to say about waiting, too. In fact, the scriptures are full of the theme of waiting. Moses waited40 years in the desert before helping Israel become free from Pharaoh. Joseph spent seven years in prison innocently before being exonerated from a crime he didn’t commit. Jesus even waited 30 years before entering public ministry.
When I’m in the thick of waiting for things, I always question the Lord. The first question is WHY do you make us wait? And most of the Christian answers I’ve heard are because God wants us to grow in trust or faith or endurance.
But what if waiting is less about the end result and more about the process?
Waiting is the ground where we commune with Christ. Jesus teaches about waiting in a well-known story called the Prodigal Son. (Unfamiliar? Google Luke 15:11-32) In the account, the Father prepared for his wandering squandering son’s return home after he cashed in his inheritance and traveled to far lands to have some fun. When the son eventually came home, broken both financially and emotionally, the Father threw a big party and served a fattened calf to the guests! But as the Father waited for his son’s return, He fed that calf, cared for it and helped it to grow until the feasting day arrived. Additionally, he kept his son’s robe and family ring when he left, resisting the urge to take it to Once Upon a Child for store credit. While He waited, the Father lived his life in patient expectation for the hope of throwing his arms around his son to welcome him home, placing his robe and signet ring back upon his beloved.
Maybe we wait because the Father in the story- who parallels God- waits. God wants us to go through seasons of waiting because he wants us to become more like Him. He is known as Patient and Long-suffering.
The season of wait you’re experiencing now, whether it’s your spouse’s return from deployment or work ups, for orders, for household goods, for restoration in your marriage… Whatever you are waiting for- God is waiting with you. He waits with you because He is in the waiting.
Waiting doesn’t have to be approached as fruitless or pointless or annoying- rather, it’s a stopgap in our hustle to encounter God. He is the gift during our times of waiting. Just as He fed the calf and grew it, He can feed our souls and grow us to greater maturity in our faith until the waiting ends and a new story unfolds. Waiting is a place of preparation and growth, where our character becomes less like me and more like Him.
Let’s not be swift in wishing waiting away, instead let’s press in and unwrap the love hidden in the process. We can wait like the Father in the story, because who doesn’t love a good story about a homecoming? Homecoming sings hope to our hearts after the long wait of deployment or training or PCS or rocky marriage seasons. Waiting beckons something deep- an emergent celebration of joy, a glimpse of the everlasting Kingdom. And at the end of the 3 missed anniversaries year after year, the Christmases apart, we can finally say “it was worth the wait!” Because He was with me when I was waiting and waiting made me more like Him.