For When the Waiting Has Worn Me Down

Devotional

There's a tired that work doesn't cause.

Hard work makes you tired in a way that feels earned. You sleep well. This isn't that. This is waking up to the same unanswered question you woke up to last year. You haven't stopped believing. You've just gotten worn out from believing without seeing anything.

Psalm 27 ends there. Not with a victory. With a command said twice.

"Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!"

The repetition isn't for style. The first time it sounds like instruction. The second time it sounds like a man talking himself into staying. Both are honest. Waiting is where faith and exhaustion live in the same house.

And what corrodes you isn't usually the pain. It's the silence. Pain with a reason attached you can carry. Waiting takes the reason away and leaves you holding the ache with nothing around it.

And in that quiet, a specific thought moves in: he's lost track of me. He's occupied. My thing slipped through.

Isaiah doesn't answer that with comfort. He answers it with two questions.

"Have you not known? Have you not heard?"

That's not scolding. That's recalibrating. Because here's what happens when you wait long enough: your picture of God starts to shrink down to the size of your fatigue. You start imagining a God who's also tired, also unsure how this resolves, also kind of hoping it works out.

Isaiah says: no. "The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable."

Unsearchable. Not absent. Those aren't the same thing. One means there's no plan. The other means there's a plan you can't trace from where you're standing.

Then Isaiah does something I love. He takes the exact thing you're out of and makes it God's specialty.

"He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength."

Look at who gets it. Not the strong who could use a little more. The faint. The ones with no might left. God's strength runs downhill and pools in the low spots. If you're at the bottom of your own reserves this morning, you're standing in the exact place he tends to show up.

"Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted." That's Isaiah taking a wrecking ball to self-sufficiency. If the strongest people you know collapse eventually, endurance was never something you could stockpile. It was always going to have to be given.

And then the famous part, but read the order.

"They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."

Fly. Run. Walk. It descends. And I don't think that's an accident, because walking is where most of your life happens. Soaring makes the poster. Walking without falling over is the daily miracle. Most of your faithfulness this year won't feel like flight. It'll feel like one foot, then the other, when everything in you wants to sit down on the curb.

Isaiah says that's supernaturally held up too.

And here's why you can trust it.

The Son of God waited thirty years in a carpenter's shop before he did one public thing. He waited through a wilderness. He waited through friends who didn't get it. And on a cross he took the real abandonment, all of it, so that your silence would never be that.

The quiet you're in is not the quiet of a God who forgot. It's the quiet of a God who already said his loudest word and hasn't taken it back.

One more thing, from Psalm 37: "Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way."

That's the poison in a long wait. You start measuring your stalled season against somebody else's momentum. His goodness to them isn't subtracted from you.

Lamentations, written in a burned city, puts it simplest: "It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD."

Good. Not pleasant. Good.

Because you're not waiting for a circumstance. You're waiting for the Lord.

And he is not late.