Flashback blog! I wrote this blog quite some time ago when we were in Vietnam…but man, God still speaks through what He spoke to me many months ago. Enjoy!
It seems as if my whole life I’ve been waiting.
When I was younger, waiting to grow up.
Waiting to drive.
Waiting to turn 18.
Waiting to go to college.
Waiting to have a boyfriend.
Waiting to go on the World Race.
Waiting to leave.
Waiting to get back home.
Waiting to start a career.
Waiting to fall in love.
Get married.
Build a home.
Have kids.
Adopt kids.
Always waiting.
I remember in high school praying Romans 8:25, “But if we hope for what we do not yet see, we wait for it patiently.” Jesus, help me be patient.
There are 2 things that Jesus has for us in the waiting:
hope & patience.
This month in Vietnam, I have been daring to hope for big things in life. For big things in Jesus. Things that cannot & will not happen unless Jesus comes through.
Hope for my lost friends and family members to come to know the fullness of love Jesus has for them.
Hope for my loved ones to marry men that love the Lord more than their own lives.
Hope for my friends that have tasted a little bit of the goodness of the Lord to be overwhelmed with the height and the depth and the length and the width of the Father’s love.
Hope for the future Jesus has planned for my life.
Hope for a husband that loves the Lord with every fiber of his being.
Hope to experience more of the presence of the Lord in my own life.
Hope for America to seek more of the Lord & to genuinely love one another.
For these things, I hope. I pray. I ask. I wait. I cry out to God day after day and then again—I hope. I pray. I ask. I wait.
And what God is teaching me right now as I sit on the second floor of a coffee shop on a cold, rainy day in Vietnam is the importance of patience in the midst of the waiting & the hoping.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…” (Galatians 5:22-23)
The fruit of patience is smacking me in the face. Thanks, Jesus.
My ESV Study Bible describes the fruit of the Spirit of patience as: “…showing that Christians are following God’s plan and timetable, rather than their own and that they have abandoned their own ideas about how the world should work.”
Patience is looking up to Jesus with all of your wants and desires and hopes in life and opening up your hands to allow Him to take them and make them prosper in His perfect timing.
Not mine.
Lord, increase a Spirit of patience within me.
So, here I am—a Month 9 Racer, re-reading a blog I wrote 4 months ago and the Lord is speaking to my heart all over again. As I sat in the Word this morning the Lord had me write down verse after verse about the word “hope”.
Psalms 39:7 says, “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you.”
If I’m being honest, some days my heart doesn’t feel any better reading about hoping in God. My circumstances don’t magically change. I don’t immediately have everything my heart desires. But there is something special about patient persistence in Jesus that changes things.
Every day I can choose to hope in the promises in His Word, rather than the reality of my circumstances. I can choose to gaze my eyes upon Jesus rather than the things in this world. Because let’s be honest, Jesus is so much better than anything this world has to offer anyways.
“One day you will wake up and all of the waiting will have made sense. You will realize that all of the prayers that seemed to be tangled in worries were actually wrapped tightly in God’s grace. You will realize that even though before, you were certain it was over, you were actually…okay, and everything that was supposed to happen, happened. Everyone you were supposed to meet, you met. Everything you were supposed to do, you did. Everywhere you were supposed to go, you went. You will begin to realize that after all this time, because of His love for you, you have always been right where you needed to be.”
-Morgan Harper Nichols
