Holding onto Faith in a Season of Waiting
With Mike D’Silva
Every season in our life is bound to teach us something valuable. We can choose whether to understand its lesson or just turn the page.
The world has had to pause, and as a reactive quiescence, has learnt to live in silence, waiting for when things will get back to normal.
But do we want to go back to those microwave dinners and microwave relationships where modern society makes every attempt to make our life faster, driving us to follow the world’s voice guided GPS, telling us where to go and what to do?
God works on a very different timetable. In His mind, there is nothing wrong with waiting. In fact, waiting can actually be a positive thing that He often uses to make us more like His Son.
Sometimes, when I’ve found myself getting impatient and upset, I remind myself that God is the one who put me here. My life is not my own. There is actually something happening while nothing is happening. God is using my waiting to change me and my understanding of my faith.
It’s easy to push God to the side, going against His plan for me and take things into my own hands. All that does is create distance in my relationship with Him. Like Mark 8:36, says, ‘’And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul’’. Holding onto faith in a season of waiting can be miserable, uncomfortable and painfully silent and it can feel like you are losing your soul. Fortunately, God is gracious and merciful and understanding of our tendencies.
I’ve found this miserable, uncomfortable, painful silence has been one of God’s most powerful tools to set me free. I’ve realised the answer can be found in the actual presence of faith. It can be found in the quiet decision to carry on trusting God even when everything is telling you to give up and give in.
Holding onto faith can be found in the daily conversation with God to keep praying even when you don’t know what to say. I’ve found that finding time to be honest with God and to know that God is listening has changed everything. God can handle our questions. He can handle our emotions, our problems, our struggles, and our disappointments. He is not overwhelmed by them.
Faith does not mean denying the reality of our situation. It just means acknowledging the reality of who God continues to be in the midst of it. 2 Corinthians 9:8 says, “God is able to make all grace abound to you”. You are not at the mercy of your circumstances.
It’s in prayer and conversation with God that we discover where God is when it hurts. He is with us; He is listening and He is still faithful. And when we pray knowing that our God is listening, it opens our hearts up to the possibility, that even though everything that we see and feel isn’t changing on the outside, everything in our heart is changing. “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” - Psalm 27:14.
And if I can encourage you today it would be this.
God remembers the smallest details; He remembers it all, as He remembered His Son Jesus in His final hour, so He has remembered you and me.
God is always listening. He promises a home beyond suffering, beyond pain and beyond the mistakes of the past.
Holding onto faith allows God to invite us to trust in His goodness today and His faithfulness tomorrow. It creates a level of maturity and character that we will take with us into the future, and it enables us to enjoy His future blessings all the more.
