Waiting

God comes to Abraham when he is 75 and tells him he is going to be a father, the ancestor of a great nation. How long was it before that promised was fulfilled? Twenty-five years. Abraham had to wait.

God told the Israelites that they would leave their slavery in Egypt and become a nation. But the people had to wait four hundred years.

God told Moses he would lead the people to the Promised Land. But they had to wait forty years in the wilderness.

Waiting is our destiny as creatures who cannot by themselves bring about what they hope for. We wait in the darkness for a flame we cannot light, we wait in fear for a happy ending we cannot write. We wait for a not yet that feels like a not ever.

Waiting must be the hardest work of hoping.

-from John Ortberg's Life to the Max