It seems like I’ve had to do a lot of waiting this year - waiting for my residency and health cards, waiting for my puppy to heal from a serious injury….. Several of my missionary friends here are also in a waiting season at the moment.
It reminded me of a previous waiting season, when I did a word study of all the verses in the Bible that speak about waiting, and I checked what the original Hebrew and Greek words actually meant. I wrote about it here on this blog in 2007. One verse that stood out at the time was Micah 7:7 - “And so I will watch for the Lord; I will wait confidently for the God of my salvation.”
The two words used here (watching and waiting) are the Hebrew verbs tsâphâh and yâchal. Both of them express the idea of trusting God completely and waiting patiently and expectantly for Him to speak or act. But it was interesting to note that the Hebrew dictionary also defined tsâphâh as, to lean forward, to peer into the distance, to look up or to keep watch.
These twin ideas of looking up and also peering into the distance suggested to me that really trusting God sometimes also includes waiting for things that can’t yet be seen - things you're hoping and praying for, but you have no guarantee of when they'll happen. All we can do is keep on looking up to the Lord during that waiting time. We may not have a promise that specifies a time frame, but we do know that God is good and will be with us in our challenging times of waiting.
