Waiting Is Not Nothing

Some waiting comes with a timetable. The train is four minutes late; the board says so; you sigh and check your phone. That kind of waiting is annoying, but it doesn't damage anything. The waiting that wears a person down is the kind with no board to check: the fiftieth job application with no reply, the illness with no clear endpoint, the hope you've almost stopped saying out loud because saying it hurts more than silence. In those seasons, the calendar keeps moving and your life doesn't, and the gap between the two is where exhaustion lives.

Isaiah 40 was written into exactly that gap. Its first readers were exiles, people who had waited so long for God to act that they had drawn a reasonable conclusion: he has forgotten us. A few verses before today's passage, Isaiah quotes their complaint word for word: 'My way is hidden from the LORD.' He doesn't scold them for saying it. He answers it, with a promise addressed specifically to the worn-out: 'those who wait for Yahweh will renew their strength.'

Look carefully at what the waiting is aimed at. Isaiah doesn't say 'those who wait for the outcome' or 'those who wait for their situation to improve.' He says those who wait for the LORD, a person, not a result. That changes the nature of the wait. Waiting for a result leaves you at the mercy of the calendar, checking the board that never updates. Waiting for a person is a relationship: you can talk to him while you wait, complain to him, hope in him. The psalmists compare it to watchmen waiting for the morning: they cannot make the sun rise one minute sooner, but they wait leaning forward, certain that dawn is the kind of thing that comes. That is the difference between waiting and mere resignation.

Then notice the strange order of the verbs: fly, run, walk. It seems backwards: shouldn't the promise build up to the eagle? But Isaiah ends at walking, and anyone in a long season knows why. Flying is for the rare exhilarating day. Running is for the seasons when life has momentum. Most of real life, and all of a waiting season, is walking: sending one more application, going to one more appointment, getting through one more ordinary Tuesday. The verse saves its final promise for exactly that. Strength not to soar above your circumstances, but to keep walking through them without collapsing.

If nothing in your life seems to be moving right now, this promise has your name on it, not because you've waited well, but because the renewing was never something you generate. The verse says those who wait will 'renew their strength,' and the picture is an exchange: your worn-out strength traded for his. You don't have to manufacture hope tonight, or pretend the season is shorter than it is. You're only invited to redirect the waiting: away from the silent inbox, toward the God who has not, in fact, forgotten.

Questions about what you just read?