When Waiting Is the Hard Part

Think about Simeon in Luke 2. He had been told he would not die before seeing the Messiah, and then he waited, presumably for years, showing up at the temple. Most of his story is the waiting. The part we remember is one afternoon.

That is how it usually goes. Joseph waited years in prison. Israel waited generations in Egypt. Hannah waited for a child. Abraham was given a promise and then went twenty-five years without it being kept. Scripture does not skip past those stretches. It treats them as the place where faith is actually built.

You are probably waiting on something right now — a decision, an acceptance, a diagnosis, a parent to change, a friendship to heal, a sense that God is close again. The waiting is not the gap before your real life starts. It is your life, and God is not idle in it.

Waiting well is not the same as waiting passively. Simeon kept showing up. Anna kept praying and fasting. You keep doing the next faithful thing: go to school, tell the truth, serve somebody, stay in the Word, keep praying about the thing you have almost given up on.

Be careful of the two ditches. One is pretending you are fine when you are not, which is just delayed honesty. The other is deciding that because it has not come yet, it never will, and quietly hardening. Advent sits between them: honest about the dark, stubborn about the light.

And this season is genuinely hard for some people. If your family is grieving, split up, or struggling this December, you are not failing at Christmas. Tell someone how you are actually doing. There is room in this story for people who are still waiting.