My toddler is screaming, so it must be Tuesday. His face is scrunched, anger etching hard lines onto his normally round face. His complexion flushes red as he hisses out a frustrated, “No,” through clenched teeth.
It isn’t a refusal to acquiesce to my request. Quite the opposite: his is a refusal to accept my refusal.
Except, I haven’t said, “No.” What I said was, “Not right now.”
Waiting is universally tricky, but by some strange paradox, it’s hardest to wait for the things you know are coming.
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I planted these peonies three years ago. (For our podcast listeners, there’s a photo of the peonies in the Substack version of this post, which you can sign up for to receive these posts to your email inbox absolutely free at mamaprays.substack.com. It’s linked in the show notes.)
They grew hardly at all, and that first winter, they disappeared entirely – which, for someone who grew up in Hawaii and migrated to California, was a completely foreign concept.
The second year, they got bigger. We were able to visually assess their progress as the stalks reached new heights. But still no blooms. They didn’t even form buds.
So as you can imagine, there was quite a bit of excitement in our house over the budding peonies and their breaking forth in all their bright glory.
The kids are even more excited about the backyard. We planted fruit trees immediately after moving in, and they have bloomed every spring since. But yesterday was the first time we bit into our sweet Rainier cherries. We only picked one, and we each had a taste, savoring the heavenly juices, a foretaste of what this tree will offer in due season for years to come.
Our timing wasn’t so great with the strawberries, which we excitedly stuffed into our mouths so quickly, only to laugh at each other's puckered faces, their sour taste filling us with the knowledge that we’d picked them too soon.
Waiting is hard, but it is so much sweeter than impatience.
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I’ve written about waiting before, but these days the story that comes to mind is the one about Noah and his ark. I imagine how it must have felt to endure the ridicule of building a boat on dry land, and the conviction that Noah must have had. That’s a kind of faith I can relate to, and hopefully aspire to.
The thing that kills me about the Noah story, is that God asked Noah and his family to get into the ark and seal it up seven days before it started raining.
What must Noah and his family have been thinking. If you knew you were about to be trapped on that boat for - literally - God knows how long, and the face of the earth would be changed forever by what was about to happen, the last place you would want to spend your last week on earth would be inside that boat.
How easy it would have been not to obey. How simple and reasonable would it have been for Noah and his family to look around, see with their own eyes that they are not in any kind of danger, and go about business as usual until the raindrops started to fall?
But they didn’t do that. They did as they were told, camping out in a boat on dry land for seven days. It’s like bad Mr. Beast video except instead of winning $100,000 for sticking it out, all they get is to avoid certain doom. Well, maybe that is better.
And you might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It was only a week.” But can you imagine the kinds of doubt that could creep in in a week – especially if you don’t know when the rains are coming. What if the serpent slithered aboard the boat, and wound his way close, his forked tongue tickling Noah’s ear?
Do you really believe God’s promise is coming?
What if you heard wrong?
What if all this work is for nothing?
What possible purpose could God have for making you wait?
If we listen to the whispers, we can forget God’s words. Instead of standing firm on a foundation of faith, we topple. We chase what sounds good in the moment. We try to force God’s hand, and wrestle the result we don’t want to wait for.
Like my son, who stands screaming before me, unable to reconcile himself to my answer.
“What did I say?” I ask. “Did I say ‘yes’ or did I say ‘no’?”
He stops to think, abruptly sobered by the question and the silliness of his own reaction. “You said yes,” he replies, sniffling reflexively from too many tears.
“That’s right. I said ‘yes.’ Just not right now.”
No amount of poking and prodding will make a seedling pop up, a flower bloom, or a tree bear fruit. In fact, it is the passing of time itself that makes those things possible. Before progress becomes visible, there is much that must take place beneath the surface.
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It’s been my experience that waiting serves dual purposes. The first is that waiting makes things precious to us. The anticipation helps to make our desires known. Whether you’re waiting to receive the Eucharist for the first time, to consummate your marriage with your future spouse whom you deeply desire, waiting to meet that spouse, waiting for the financial freedom to become a stay-at-home-mom to your sweet babies, or waiting for God to grant you the joy of motherhood in the first place, waiting can be excruciating.
Growing patience, like growing roots, takes time. Roots keep a tree grounded. They keep it from toppling over. They allow it to flourish and absorb the nutrients needed to put out fruits. And the deeper they go, the more resistant the tree is to drought and times of scarcity.
When we are in seasons of waiting, impatience tells us to look at the fruits (or the lack thereof, rather). It says to look at the empty branches and despair. It says to go buy some grocery store fruit and paste it onto the tree. It says to take a branch off a fruitful tree and graft it onto this one. It tells us to look anywhere but beneath the surface, where the action is happening.
God uses waiting both as a time of preparation, for us to grow roots and to clarify our desires and strengthen our resolve for times like drought, when the going inevitably becomes tough.
And sometimes, He uses it for another purpose entirely, to bring about some good that we know nothing about. Jacob labored seven years for Rachel, only to be deceived by her father Laban, and married instead to her sister Leah. He had to work another seven years to receive his heart’s desire. And while Rachel was the favored wife, and her son Joseph saved the family and the legacy of Israel from starvation, it was through Leah’s line, from the tribe of Judah so many years later, that the Messiah would come.
A hidden purpose, entirely God’s own.
Whatever excruciating waiting period you find yourself in, be it wandering the desert for 40 years in search of the Promised Land, waiting for a backordered washing machine to arrive, or in the final month of pregnancy that feels itself 40 years long, resist the urge to furiously and frantically scour your landscape for fruit.
The fruit will come. Now isn’t the time to bite in.
Now is the time for growing deep roots and faith in God’s purposes. And that time is called patience.
And patience, as it turns out, is as simple as accepting Jesus’s assurance to us:
Blessed are we who believe in what we cannot see.