Where is God in the Waiting

by Melissa Macker

Life is complicated and messy. Sometimes God absolutely works miracles. But other times he can respond more like another answer to suffering: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." (2 Corinthians 12:9). And sometimes, God just doesn't answer right away.

For those of you who don't know my story, it took me 10 years to become a mom after my husband and I decided we were ready to become parents. First, we tried getting pregnant like most people do, and then I went through some medical interventions to address my infertility. Finally, we felt like God was leading us to pursue adoption. The paperwork itself takes a lot of time, and then after we completed the paperwork, we waited...and waited...and waited to be matched with an infant. Most adoption agencies will tell you that the average wait time to be matched is 6 months to 2 years. For whatever reason, we were not average. After 6 years of waiting to match, we were matched with a two-and-a-half-year-old little boy, and we said yes. Since this agency places newborn infants 99% of the time, my husband and I joke we can't do anything normally. But we are finally parents!

My faith went through a lot of ups and downs in those 10 years. I'm the type of person that if I want to do something, I can usually figure out what I need to do and get it done. I have been blessed with a lot of good things in my life, and God has provided for me in a variety of circumstances. But creating a child or even adopting one is something that I really had little control over, and that was so hard for me. There was a season where I was angry with God for making me barren. There was a time when I wanted to pursue adoption because it felt like something I could control (lol), and I heard God telling me to wait. There was a season when I asked God to tell me what I should do, and all I got was silence. In between, sometimes I prayed and asked for a child, and sometimes I just wondered if it would ever happen. There were a lot of times I just broke down in tears and cried during a worship song at church while I clung to truths about God's goodness that I couldn't see in that moment. I knew that God had promised to give me good things as His child, but he had never actually promised to give me a child. All I knew was that He had given me the desire to become a mom, and it was unfulfilled. In spite of that, God was still good, and He was still in control.

At New City Church we spend a lot of time studying the Old Testament through sermons. In recent years we've been walking through Genesis and Exodus. Those stories give me a lot of comfort because the people of Israel waited a long time for things to happen. When the stories are all written together, it's easy for it to feel like miracles are just happening back to back. But between Genesis and Exodus, hundreds of years pass. Joseph and his brothers, the fathers of the tribes of Israel, live and die in Egypt. Generations come and go, and then the people are in slavery for a while before we get to the story of Moses. Even then, Moses grew up, left Egypt, got married, and started a family before God sent him back to Egypt to rescue the people of Israel from their slavery.

As we studied Exodus, I felt the weight of that waiting. The Israelites don't always show a lot of faith in the book of Exodus, but I'm kind of amazed they had any left after centuries of living in Egypt without hearing from God. In the middle of that, we read Exodus 2:23-25:

"During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel--and God knew."

When we studied those verses, I was still waiting to become a mom. I still didn't know if it would ever happen. In the midst of my groaning, in the midst of the weariness, it gave me so much comfort to know that God saw me, and that he knew.

I always believed God was in control, but some days that didn't bring much comfort. It was easy to feel like He had left me alone, that happy endings were for other people who were more spiritual than me, that my waiting was because God loved me less. I desperately needed to really believe in my heart the truths that I had in my head: that God is good even when my circumstances are not, that He would still be good no matter how my story ended, and that I still mattered to him.

Recently Pastor Keith preached a sermon about how God hears us. Psalm 6 was written by David, a man who God most certainly loved, but who still went through a lot of challenges in life. The Psalm describes his constant grief, and then says:

"The Lord has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lord has heard my plea; the Lord accepts my prayer. All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled; they shall turn back and be put to shame in a moment." (Psalm 6:8b-10)

David doesn't say God hears him because God has rescued him. He believes God WILL rescue him because He believes God always hears his prayers. The fact is, in those 10 years, God never stopped hearing me. It's not like He forgot about me, went back and listened to his voicemails, and then said, "oh yeah, I need to get back to her." He was always near, always loving me, seeing and hearing me in my hurt. Like a compassionate Father, he sympathized with me in my sorrow. For whatever reason, He was just writing a different story than the one I wanted.

I am so happy that God finally made me a mom. I wanted to write this, though, because in my waiting it was easy to feel like God was only at work in other people's lives and not in mine. We celebrate the ways we see God at work, but if you're still waiting for your happy ending, I want you to be encouraged that God hasn't forgotten about you. God hears your prayers, loves you, and understands your hurt, even when your circumstances are unchanged. If you believe in Christ, all will be made right either here or in heaven.

I also write this because sometimes I still wonder why He didn't make it happen sooner. I may never know, but I do know God loved me as much 5 years ago and 10 years ago as He loves me now. I need to believe that, and I need to believe He still loves me when I'm losing patience with the toddler I waited for. Through Jesus, I can know that God always loves me.

"But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved--and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." (Ephesians 2:4-6)