The Grace in the Waiting Room

"The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." Lamentations 3:25–26

I am writing this from a season of waiting.

Not the cute kind. Not the Pinterest-quote-on-a-watercolor-background  kind of waiting. The kind where I keep checking my email for news that is not coming yet. The kind where I have already done everything I know how to do — and now the rest is not in my hands.

My next book, Things We Hide, releases this fall. The manuscript is finished. The cover is designed. And right now, in this very specific season of June, my job is mostly to wait.

If you have ever sat in a literal waiting room — at a doctor's office, in a hospital corridor, at a fertility clinic, at a school for a meeting about your child — you know that waiting rooms have a particular quality. The fluorescent lighting. The same magazines from three years ago. The clock that does not move. The way time stops being something you spend and becomes something that spends you.

Spiritually, most of us know that room well.

You are waiting on a job to come through. You are waiting on a relationship to be repaired. You are waiting on a diagnosis to come back. You are waiting on your kid to come home — or come to faith — or come to therapy. You are waiting on a season of grief to stop being so heavy. You are waiting on a marriage to come back to life. You are waiting on the next yes. Or the next clear word. Or the next anything.

And nobody warned you about the quality of that waiting. The way it makes you feel useless. The way it makes you doubt that you ever heard from God in the first place. The way it makes you check, and check again, and check again, like maybe this time the room will be different.

What We Get Wrong About Waiting

Most of us were taught — by the church, by self-help culture, by our own internal narrators — that waiting is the gap between two things. The intermission. The dead space between the good stuff.

If I am waiting, the thinking goes, then nothing meaningful is happening yet. The real life starts when the waiting ends.

But Scripture refuses to let me hold waiting this way."It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord."

Good. Not tolerable. Not endurable. Good.

Lamentations is the most honest book in the Bible about grief and dislocation. The whole book is a long, raw cry of devastation — Jerusalem is destroyed, the people are exiled, everything they trusted is rubble.

And right in the middle of all of that grief, the writer plants this stubborn flag:

The waiting is not the gap. The waiting is the thing.

The waiting is where the soul learns what it cannot learn in motion. The waiting is where the heart figures out what it actually wants. The waiting is where the relationship between you and God becomes something more honest than the relationship you were having when everything was working.

The waiting room is not the intermission. The waiting room is the chapel.

What I Am Learning in Mine

A few honest things about my own season:

I am learning that I trust God more easily when I am producing something. When I am writing, when I am building, when I am visibly doing. And I am learning that this is a problem, because it means my trust is mostly trust in my own usefulness — not trust in His goodness.

I am learning that the silence is not absence. God is not less present in the months I am not writing than He was in the months I was. He is not less present when I am stuck than when I am moving. My productivity does not regulate His proximity.

I am learning that there is grace in the waiting that I cannot access any other way. Some lessons cannot be sprinted past. Some healings cannot be rushed. Some kinds of trust can only be built when you have to wait long enough to discover that He really does show up.

And I am learning — slowly, against everything in my Western, achievement-shaped instincts — that waiting can be active. Waiting is not just sitting in the room. Waiting is praying without ceasing. Waiting is feeding the soul on what is already true. Waiting is showing up to the same prayer for the hundredth time and meaning it again. Waiting is the discipline of hoping without proof.

For The Woman In Her Own Waiting Room

If you are in a waiting room of your own — and most of us are, at any given moment — here is what I want you to hear today:

The waiting is not punishment. God is not making you sit there because He is annoyed. He is not withholding to teach you a lesson about gratitude. The waiting is not a consequence; it is a season.

The waiting is not wasted. You will not arrive on the other side of this and discover the time you spent here was a loss. You will arrive on the other side and discover that something was being built in you that could not have been built any other way.

The waiting is not silent. It feels silent. It is not silent. God is doing more under the surface of your waiting season than you can see from inside the room. Trust the work you cannot see.

The waiting is not solitary. You think nobody else is sitting in a room like yours. You are surrounded by women in their own waiting rooms, all doing exactly what you are doing — trying to make it look like nothing is happening, while their whole insides are wrestling. You are not alone in this room. You may just be in different rooms in the same hospital.

A Prayer For The Waiting

If you do not have words today, borrow these. Father God, I do not know how long this season will be. I do not know what is on the other side of it. I do not even know, on most days, what You are doing in it. Help me to wait quietly. Help me to wait without bitterness. Help me to wait without forcing. Help me to wait without checking out. Make this waiting room a chapel. Meet me in it. Build in me what could not be built any other way. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

If you are in a waiting room, please know you are not alone in it. We are sitting in different rooms in the same hospital. And the same God who has been faithful to me in this season is the God sitting next to you in yours.

Grace in the waiting.

Grace and grit, Kristen